How to Start & Run a B&B BandBED2eBook-1 | Page 80

Of course, you have to think this through and react within seconds while White in on
the phone. There won’t be another chance, as White will phone your competitors if you
can’t take his booking. The golden rules are (1) don’t turn down an attractive booking
without having carefully considered all your options, and (2) buy time if needs be.
“Buying time” can simply mean accepting the booking, knowing that you need to check
another booking – if your ideal plan is not possible, going back to the person who has
just booked within a few minutes or hours with profuse apologies is better than not
having given yourself the chance to adjust another booking. And you may well be
successful.
The above example is probably the simplest and most basic imaginable, but it serves to
illustrate the kind of challenge you will get almost weekly, and the quick-witted and
hard-headed commercial instincts you will need to develop. It often gets much more
complex and demanding, as anyone in the business will tell you.
The challenges, and the skills required to deal with them, are not unique to B&Bs
though – they are part of running any business. If you have business experience before
starting your B&B, it will give you a very good head start.
The art of managing your bookings could, as we said, fill a book in itself. But you are
an intelligent person (if you weren’t, you wouldn’t have bought our book), and the
skills you need are a mixture of innate commercial instinct, experience, common sense
and creativity. To be honest, anyone who needs to read a book to train themselves to
think like a businessperson probably should not run a business.
We will not leave this crucial subject there, though. We won’t insult your intelligence
by stating the obvious, but we will highlight areas for you to think about, which may
help you get to grips with things more quickly, and so make a success of your business.
Our advice would be in three parts:

Aims

Rules

Flexibility
The important thing is to always keep in mind some simple aims: obviously,
maximising revenue is the overall aim, and within that, getting longer bookings is an
aim (fewer changeovers, fewer arrivals and departures). Getting multiple occupancy
will be an aim (ie selling rooms as doubles or even family rooms rather than as single
occupancy).
After the aims, having a few “rules” for bookings will help – an example is “no single
night bookings will be accepted on Friday or Saturday nights in peak periods”.
How rigid these rules are is up to you – this is where the much-needed flexibility comes
in. Three points:
a) You will find it very difficult to apply any rules unless they are written down
somewhere clearly – for example on your website, and/or in your leaflet. At
How to Start & Run a B&B
www.howtorunabandb.com