How To Grow Your Bed & Breakfast Revenue Streams

Networking with people

Networking by definition is interacting with others to exchange information and developing professional or social contacts. Being visible and getting noticed is one of the biggest benefits of networking. By attending business meetings and events people will begin to recognise you and you will start to build your reputation as someone with expertise in the tourism and travel industry. 

Networking can often be confused with selling but it is actually about building long-term relationships. These relationships can in return potentially help you when a person that you network with has visitors or friends coming into your area in regards to a place to stay! So get out there and start forming relationships to help you potentially generate more bookings.

Offering discounts & incentives

One of the easiest strategies to implement which can generate additional income is to offer an incentive to stay for longer periods. Consider periods that you often struggle to find bookings in and promote these with discounts.  

Or think about ideas that offer breakfasts, late checkouts or freebies with a 'customer value' that does not cost you the earth, or better still, costs you nothing. In our experience, offering a later checkout for a Monday morning departure not only extends your weekend occupancy but adds real value without any additional cost.

Be creative, you want people to stay longer don't you?

Up-selling

The ability to up-sell your customers or partnering with a booking system that provides the capability to up-sell during the booking confirmation stage can help you generate more than just additional revenue. According to successful entrepreneur, Neil Patel:

“Upselling accomplishes three very good things: 1) deepens relationships, 2) raises the value that the customer receives, 3) increases the customer’s customer lifetime value (CLV). Upselling is a win-win. Customers get better stuff. You get more cash. And here’s the kicker: The customer is going to stay around longer.”

Try not to view up-selling as something bad for you or your existing customers, think retention and consider the value you will be adding to their business model.

Watching thy neighbour

Keeping track of what the competitors are doing can significantly effect the bookings you generate during periods of the year. In order to see what they are doing in regards to advertising and their Search Engine Optimisation strategies, there are tools that allow you to spy on your competitors.

We recommend, and like, the software tools https://www.spyfu.com/ and http://ispionage.com/ (which we will go into on another article) that allow you to not only gain advantage from your competitor's traffic but give you insights into what ads they are using in Google that generate traffic to their website.

Both of these tools offer amazing insights into your competitors winning strategies that you can then use!

Offering free WiFi

With travelers so connected to their loved ones and their businesses, having free WiFi available to your guests during their stay will add a competitive advantage to your Bed and Breakfast. As quoted by Small Business Trends

Quality and price were two traditional ways that helped businesses to differentiate themselves. Technology is forcing businesses to think again of this approach. We live in the age of smartphones. So providing free WiFi can provide a significant advantage over others. There are people who select venues based upon availability of free WiFi. Thus, your business is bound to have an advantage over your competitors if they do not offer free WiFi.

Maximising your Bed and Breakfast revenue streams are important for your success and growth. Focusing on a few of the strategies above (or all of them) will potentially see your business increase its customer base, expand your brand's reach and help with your reputation in the marketplace.

Posted by ResBook Team on August 28, 2018