Bed and breakfast availability
Find b&b, guest house, hotel and self catering accommodation

1. What is The Bed & Breakfast Availability System?
The Availability System is a way of doing electronically something you do already. If you cannot offer potential customers a room you invite them to phone your friends. The great thing about the System is that it knows if they have availability, whereas you don't!

2. How does the Bed & Breakfast Availability System bring me business?
- Firstly, this portal website is found in search by Google, Yahoo!, Bing and AOL. For example if someone needed a room in Maidenhead they may search for ‘Maidenhead bed breakfast’, ‘Maidenhead B&B’, ‘visit Maidenhead’, etc and find www.bedbreakfastavailability.co.uk and your advert in it.
- Secondly, the person looking for a room is more likely to contact you in the knowledge you have availability.
- Thirdly, the websites of other members are found by the search engines and when these establishments cannot meet demand the leads are passed on to the rest of the group.

3. How many visitors will the Bed & Breakfast Availability System drive to my website?
This depends on your location, how well your own website does in search engine search and how much marketing you do. From our own customers’ websites which we manage the lowest is 277 visitors in a year, the highest is 1470 and the average is 775. In reality the figures are an understatement because some customers make contact after seeing the advert and do not view the customers’ websites where the traffic is recorded.

4. Will my phone still ring?
Yes, but mainly when you want it to ring. You'll find you are spending less time dealing with people to whom you cannot offer a room and more time dealing with people to whom you can! On balance you will spend less time answering the phone.

5. After I join, how do I know how much business the Bed & Breakfast Availability System is bringing me?
Put a visitor tracker on your website. We recommend Google Analytics which is a free service. Remember that when making comparisons with other portal websites and search engines customers will follow the link ONLY if they see availability. Therefore the performance of www.bedbreakfastavailability.co.uk, although impressive, will be understated.

6. Do I need my own website to be eligible to join this scheme?
Yes, for these reasons:

• you will be motivated to update your availability database if it is displayed on your own website too.
• your website contains essential information to help the enquirer
• you will be contributing to the local marketing effort

7. I do not have a website - can you help?
Yes, for an extra £45 per annum we’ll give you a starter website including your own domain name and e-mail address.

8. Why do you add a search bar to my website?
Whether or not you have availability is an important piece of information for customers and, as you know, they do not like to phone you to be told there is no vacancy. When you are full, customers are passed seemlessly to others in the group.

9. So what is special about your availability search bar?
It can be customised in the colours of your website. It loads fast on opening so your customers do not have to wait. It links to the same database as this portal site so you only update one database, not two.

10. How often do I need to update my availability?
This depends on how you have set it up. If you have decided to display the availability of each individual room, then you should cross off that room's availability when it is gone. However, if you have decided to display the room type, for example double room, you need cross off availability only when you've let the last double room.

11. How easy is it to update my availability?
Very! Click to open availability calendar; click to update a room; click to save. (30 seconds?)

12. Where will my advert appear in the list?
All adverts appear in random order. Therefore your advertisement can appear in different positions in the list each time you look, provided that your availability has been updated at least once in the last two weeks

13. What happens if I do not update availability?
It is in your own interest to update regularly and it' is easy. You can update from any computer, anywhere in the world, which has internet access. If you don't update, even after gentle reminders, your availability search results will display question marks, not ticks and crosses. Customers will be asked to phone you for availability.

14. Can I advertise only and not show availability?
Yes. In such circumstances your advertisement will be displayed at the bottom of the town page of the portal website.