How to Start & Run a B&B BandBED2eBook-1 | Page 77

Taking Enquiries
You need to be contactable every waking hour, every day. If someone wants to check
availability and make a booking, they will do it at their own convenience, and in their
own time, and this may be in the evening, on Sunday morning, or whilst you are
relaxing on the beach on holiday. That is the business you are in. The second thing to
remember is that, in most cases, if an enquirer cannot get an answer from you first time,
he or she will simply call your competitors. So one missed phone call can lose a
booking. We’ve returned phone calls within ten or 20 minutes to find that the enquirer
has since booked elsewhere.
We’d recommend either (a) setting up an automatic divert to your mobile whenever
you are not at home – and keeping the mobile on of course!, or (b) using BT’s “1571”
service with their text warning option – this sends your mobile a text message as soon
as a message is left on your home phone: you can thus return calls very swiftly when
you are out.
Of course, enquiries can also come in by email – eg from your website – and again,
people tend to assume that email is instantaneous. At home, it is vital that you check
and respond to emails frequently throughout the day. When you are away from home,
you should either (a) have an “auto reply” email message asking people to call you
with urgent enquiries, or (b) have messages forwarded to a portable device or mobile
phone, if you have a high-tech lifestyle.
Bookings Book
So far, we have only talked about taking enquiries. The heart of your bookings system
is though (as the name implies), a book. Your bookings book. Of course, this could be
a spreadsheet of even a piece of specialist hotel-booking software, but for smaller B&Bs
this is probably overkill, and you will do what we do and use a book.
The benefit of this low-tech approach is that you can easily take the book with you and
use it anywhere, any time. You do not have to have a computer or laptop turned on.
And of course, don’t forget that you will have to take the book with you everywhere –
on the train, on holiday, on days out – or you won’t be able to deal with the enquiries
which can come in at any time, any day. Any one call could potentially be worth
hundreds of pounds to you.
We simply buy an A4 size, hardback, week-per view diary for each year. This has
three days down each left-hand page and four days down each right-hand page.
Sundays are given less space than other days, but this is OK, because you’ll get fewer
bookings on Sundays. At the beginning of the year, we rule each page vertically with
two parallel lines, dividing it (and hence each day) into three equal parts. This gives us
a “column” for each of our three letting bedrooms, which we head with each room
name (always in the same order to save confusion, of course!).
If you follow this method, you have a very cheap, easy, and convenient way to handle
and record your bookings. Each room has a space of about 2” x 2.5” per day, which is
ample to record (using small but clear writing) all you need to record, which is: