How to Start & Run a B&B BandBED2eBook-1 | Page 71

Breakfast is, with room changeovers, one of the two major areas of workload you will
have as a B&B owner. You will spend many hours cooking, serving and clearing away
breakfasts, so you need to get into a well-planned routine.
Hours
Firstly, some basic practicalities. It is essential that you make clear to your guests what
the “rules” are on key things like check-out times and, of course, breakfast times. If
this is vague or unclear, you will find guests coming down whilst you are still in bed or
(more likely) you will still be waiting in the kitchen looking at your watch at the time
you promised you’d meet your friend in town for coffee.
So spell out breakfast times to each guest on arrival, and clearly print it in room
information sheets.
In our own B&B, our breakfast times are: 07:30 to 08:30 midweek and 08:30 to 09:30 on
Saturdays and Sundays. This seems to work well, although sometimes after 55
minutes of waiting, we start to wish we had set a 30 minute range instead of an hour!
We have three rooms, but prefer not to have six guests all coming down for breakfast at
the same time, so when we are full, and if the guests are happy to do so, we try to
arrange more specific times with each couple to stagger their breakfast times.
Menu and ingredients
Very clear and simple advice here: in our experience, it pays NOT to economise on
ingredients! It is very easy to save a few pence with an inferior sausage or cheap bread,
but customers will notice. We buy bread for over £1 a loaf because it is the best we can
find, and we get lots of appreciative comments about it. We have tried many different
kinds of sausages, and have settled at present on Westaways premium West Country
farmhouse sausages, which have an “old-fashioned” taste which has some of our guests
waxing lyrical. One lady said that she had never tasted sausages as good as ours for 30
years! We could pay a quarter of the price to buy economy catering sausages, but our
visitors would not go away so happy, nor be as likely to come back or to recommend us
to their friends.
Alastair Sawday, the publishers of the “Special Places to Stay” series of guidebooks to
British B&Bs, understand the importance of the quality of breakfast to B&B clients, and
have launched a “Fine Breakfast Scheme” for the B&Bs they recommend. It is worth
including the “Pledge” they ask B&B owners to sign below:
Alastair Sawday
Fine Breakfast Scheme Pledge
1) I promise always to serve breakfasts of only the best available ingredients –
whether organic or locally sourced
2) Any certified organic ingredients will be named as such. (Note that the word
‘organic’ is a legal term. Any uncertified ‘organic’ ingredients cannot be described
as organic.) Where there is a choice of organic certifier I will prefer the Soil