How to Start & Run a B&B BandBED2eBook-1 | Page 84

2) You state that breakfast is served between 8.30am and 9.30am. You make a
point of telling every guest this on arrival, and pointing out their information
sheet in their room, where the times are also clearly printed. No guest can thus
come down at 8.00am and reasonably expect breakfast to be immediately served.
Likewise, if a guest comes down at 10.00am, he cannot expect breakfast at all.
With breakfast, if it has reached 10 or 15 minutes from the end of our breakfast time and
a guest has still not come down, we call their room to remind them and offer them the
chance to have breakfast, or miss it if they prefer. They might rather at least have the
choice than miss it inadvertently – and at least then we know they are going to come
down in a few minutes, or are going to miss breakfast in which case we can start
clearing up.
Departure or check-out times must also be very clear, so that you can plan your life. If
you have not stated a time clearly enough, don’t be surprised if your guest lingers in his
room until lunchtime, making you miss your 11.30 dental appointment.
Our check-out time is 11.00am. Of course, if we have a guest who is getting a train at
2pm, we may invite him to wait in the drawing room downstairs for a further hour or
so after 11.00am, as long as he has vacated the room by then so it can be stripped and
cleaned (and as long as we do not have to go out ourselves at 11.00am, of course).
Back to that essential “diary discipline” – you must keep an eye on your bookings book
to plan each week well ahead, bearing in mind the arrivals, departures, breakfasts and
changeovers you have each day, and how these fit with the rest of your commitments.
This is of course also something to keep in mind as you decide to accept each booking.
If you have another diary or diaries (say, personal and business) in addition to your
bookings book, you will need to consult them all as you take each booking, and on a
daily basis as you keep all those plates spinning.
As we are on the subject of diary disciplines, this is a good place to mention holidays –
your holidays. You may be, as we have always been (in our case, typical for travel
industry people!), late bookers of holidays. We rarely booked our own holidays more
than a few short weeks ahead. That has to change when you run a B&B. You have to
fix your holiday dates (you can book the destination as late as you like of course) a long
way in advance – before you start to get any bookings for that part of the year. This
tends to mean at the beginning of the year or even well before Christmas the previous
year in our case – and for many traditional seaside-resort B&Bs, it will mean at least a
year ahead as many guests book their next year’s Summer break whilst on this year’s.
Needless to say, if you don’t decide your holiday dates and clearly block them off in
your bookings book, you will take bookings scattered across every week of the season
and be unable to go away at all.
This does not only apply to longer holidays of a week or two, but to weekends or “long
weekends” or public holidays like Easter which you want to keep for yourselves and
your family. By definition these will book up soonest, so unless you want to be
working all year, think ahead and block off “your” days in the bookings book!
How to Start & Run a B&B
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