Myths About Innkeepers

I'll never forget the morning when I was serving breakfast at the Carriage House Inn and a guest asked me what my plans were for the day. Before I could recite the list of chores I had lined up, she chirped, “It’s so beautiful out. Are you heading to the beach?” It took every fiber of my being to refrain from telling her about the previous night when, after a twelve hour day, James had surprised me by shucking some oysters and opening a bottle of bubbly for no reason, in particular. I was just about to slurp up a plump one when the phone rang – a guest’s heat was on the fritz and James headed over to determine that the thermostat needed replacing. So, on a Saturday night, we paid time and a half to have the problem fixed, the champagne went flat and the oysters went bad. But, I bit my tongue and reminded myself that the good days really do outweigh the bad.

In addition to the misconception about our “lounge by the pool” lifestyle, another myth about innkeepers is that we live in pristine homes with organized, labeled spice racks, homemade cleaning products, and sock drawers sorted by color. In reality, we have cabinets full of mismatched, chipped reject mugs from the inn, stained sheets and towels which were unacceptable for guest rooms, but a shame to throw away, and odd pieces of furniture which needed replacing at the inn, but again, were in decent enough shape to relocate to our house.

You will also never find a new bottle of shampoo or a full roll of toilet paper in an innkeeper’s home. You know how when you check into a hotel whose rating is anything above that of, say a motel that has five deadbolts and bullet proof glass, and there is a practically full roll of toilet paper in the bathroom? What do you think happens to all the quarter rolls that are too skimpy to leave for the next guest? That’s right – they find their way into the housekeeper or innkeeper’s giant basket of dinky toilet paper ends. Same with leftover shampoo – I have a permanent siphoning system set up in my bathroom where the little travel shampoos are funneled into my economy size Suave bottle. Also, my floor hasn’t seen a vacuum in weeks. Despite my anal retentive tendencies, I use all my vigor to clean at the inn. I mean, really, do chefs come home after cooking dinner for 200 people and decide to fix themselves a gourmet meal?

Yes, the life of an innkeeper is different from what most envision and this blog will continue to take you behind the schenes to showcase that life. You may also wish to visit PAII (Professional Association of Innkeepers International) which is a fantastic resource for both aspiring and seasoned innkeepers and also provides networking opportunities.

What Nobody Ever Tells You About Innkeeping

Before we knew it, the winter was behind us and we found ourselves in the throws of a busy summer. We were into a routine – James cooked the breakfasts and I served them each morning. We waited until all the guests had eaten and the dishes were done until we had our own breakfast. Then we stripped and stocked the rooms for the housekeeper, booked reservations, answered emails, paid the bills, dealt with maintenance, worked in the gardens, checked guests in, and baked cookies…all before lunch. We expected all of this. But here are a few things no one ever told us:

- Sheets on hotel beds don’t just come out of the dryer looking crisp and wrinkle free. Someone has to iron those. That someone turned out to be me. Every day, I’d tackle a pile of sheets – at first I pressed the entire set – have you ever tried to iron a fitted sheet? I quickly wised up and realized that ironing the pillow cases and the first quarter or so of the flat sheet was sufficient. We went through a lot of starch.

- People actually walk into your personal living space without knocking. We immediate invested in a “Private” sign. It didn’t help.

- It is almost impossible to eat a meal without interruption. We would sit down to eat dinner and inevitably the phone or doorbell would ring or a smoke detector would go off or a pipe would burst or something.

- There’s no crying in innkeeping. I’ve always been a bit of an oversensitive type – you know, tearing up during hallmark commercials, rescuing stray animals, that kind of thing. That all changed quickly when I became an innkeeper. I’ve allowed a guest to make me cry exactly once and it was a pitiful and humiliating experience I don’t care to repeat. Innkeepers have to have a backbone, or get one fast.

- Speaking of backbones, housekeepers are the backbone of any bed and breakfast, motel, hotel, resort, etc. There is absolutely no way to run a successful hospitality operation without relying on a housekeeping staff. When we bought the Carriage House, we banked on doing a lot of the cleaning ourselves. Wrong. Our housekeeper became our best friend and money very well spent.

- You can’t please everyone. Believe me, I’ve tried!

Marketing 101

I was a marketing and entrepreneurial studies major in college. You would think I would have had a clue as to how to design a winning marketing plan. I didn’t. Instead, James and I put our heads together and decided common sense was the way to go. We had three months until we closed on the Carriage House – I used any free time I could steal to research website designers, internet marketing avenues, learn about Google rankings and Pay Per Click advertising, and design brochures and rate cards. Ultimately, our marketing plan was: KISS (keep it simple stupid). We decided the key was to get people in the door, deliver a high quality and memorable experience, and entice them back again and again. Basically, we did four things:

1. While the guest rooms were in little need of cosmetic improvement, they were in need of modernization. We perused the circulars in the paper for deals on TV’s, DVD players, a computer for the common area, coffee makers, hair dryers, and ironing boards and when we found good deals we bought six of everything. In addition, we dropped our rates slightly thereby enhancing our product and creating value.

2. We spent the bulk of our advertising dollars on creating a user friendly website. We paid for professional photographs of the guestrooms and implemented an invaluable online booking tool Basically, for way less money than print advertising, we were reaching potential guests all over the world at any time of day and saving man hours by allowing them to book online or at the very least educating guests before they call.

3. An informative website is great but it's useless if nobody can find it. We educated ourselves on internet marketing and took a three prong approach: creating a pay per click campaign, having our web designer properly design our site to rank high in organic searches, and joining pay per inclusion websites like bedandbreakfast, bbonline, lanierbb, and virtualcapecod where you basically pay to be part of their site and then they do the marketing for you. Over the years, we have found Acorn Internet Services to be a particularly good marketing resource for innkeepers.

4. We designed a $20 coupon mailer and distributed it to our guest list. The coupon was good for a $20 discount per night to be used by a certain date. It didn't work and was the last mass mailing we ever did. Aside from a handful of publications, we rarely do print advertising as our internet plan has paid for itself over and over.

While we did not rely on a professional consultant to help with our marketing and financial plan, there are professionals out there who specialize in helping aspiring and new innkeepers get up and running. With my marketing education, and James' years spent in the hotel business, we didn't outsource in this area, but for anyone starting from scratch, it might not be a bad investment.

In 2.5 years at the Carriage House, we tripled the occupancy rate but not without some struggles, lessons, and of course, laughs along the way…

Finding My Passion

Let’s rewind five years to the summer of 2003. I, like so many of the guests who envy my lifestyle, was working in corporate America. I was in administration at a consulting firm in downtown Boston, the latest of several jobs I had held over the last five years or so out of college. I should digress a moment and point out that we are young innkeepers. That’s why you will see phrases on this blog like, “I came home after a rough day at work and pounded down a bottle of Chardonnay,” as opposed to, “I decided to blow off some steam after a long day by finishing the sweater I’ve been knitting my grandson.”

Anyway, I couldn’t stand working for someone else and hopped from company to company hoping to find a job I felt passionate about. Finally, one particularly depressing day when I was feeling restless once again, I made my way down the elevator of the high rise office complex where I worked to the Barnes and Noble below. Impulsively, I bought a copy of Running a Bed and Breakfast for Dummies. I distinctly remember the cashier asking if I owned a B&B to which I responded, “not yet.” I flipped through the book in the confines of my cubicle and noted a website the authors had created – http://www.bedandbreakfast.com/. Perfect…I could pretend to do work while perusing the site. I found a link on the site to “inns for sale” and immediately did a search for properties on Cape Cod. My husband, James, who worked at a prestigious downtown Boston hotel, and I had fantasized about owning a B&B in Chatham - where he had vacationed as a kid - when we retired thirty years down the road. But we had never even broached the idea of doing it any sooner. My search generated a list of three B&B’s on the Cape, one of which – the Carriage House Inn - looked just like the dream inn we had envisioned. I spontaneously emailed the link to James at work and got back to alphabetizing files or whatever I was supposed to be doing.

For the next three days or so, I put my little fantasy out of my mind. I didn’t even mention it to James at home and completely forgot that I had emailed him the listing. Then, on a Friday afternoon, a response from James appeared in my inbox. As is typical of my fiscally responsible husband, his reply was a preliminary hypothetical profit and loss statement based on current interest rates, a rough estimate on occupancy rates, and the average daily rate provided on the sales specs. His analysis? Maybe this could work! Now, I should point out that in our relationship, I am the idealist and James is the realist. The fact that James was fueling my enthusiasm meant something here. We had plans to spend the weekend with his parents at their vacation home on the Cape that weekend so I printed the listing and stuffed it in my suitcase.

Turned out, my enthusiasm was contagious. Over dinner that night, we showed the listing to James’ parents who encouraged us to call the realtor. To me, this was even more huge than James’ optimistic spreadsheet. His parents are conservative by nature. For them to encourage even the possibility of us uprooting our stable (though in my case, fickle) careers, complete with health insurance and 401k plans to embark on a business that could sink or swim, was the push we needed to call the realtor. I was already deciding what coffee to serve for breakfasts at the inn as I dialed the number, but my bubble burst when I was informed that there was a bid on the inn which had been accepted. Other offers were being entertained, though, as there was a home sale contingency on the contract and the sellers were eager to sell. We set up an appointment to view the property, but with an overwhelming sense that we were wasting the realtor’s time – the likelihood of being able to counter the offer if we even liked the property was slim.

The cards were in our favor though. The inn was in fantastic condition cosmetically with six well appointed rooms and a comfortable apartment for the innkeepers. What was lacking were the essentials of a viable business – occupancy numbers were low, the website was practically non-existent, and it was the middle of summer. We wouldn’t be able to close on the property until fall at the earliest and there were no reservations on the books after mid-October. It would be a rough winter of eating Ramen noodles and leftovers, but we were game. After all, there is a certain romance about scrimping and saving to fulfill your lifelong dream, right?

To make a long and fairly boring story short, we were able to put together a business plan and get backing from a bank to move forward with the sale and outbid the previous offer. This all happened fairly quickly and while we knew we had the business sense and personalities to be innkeepers, those talents couldn’t be put to the test unless we had guests. We would need to figure out a marketing plan – and fast!

Behind the Scenes with Jill

If I had a dollar for every time a guest told me that I have her dream job, I could retire and spend the rest of my days sipping Chianti and eating too much pasta on a remote island off the coast of Sicily. I suppose that to the outsider’s eye, my job is pretty cushy. They see me working the breakfast room chatting easily about restaurants and beaches with people from all over the world. They see the gorgeous property where I have the great fortune to live, and the lavish displays of tea cakes and pastries that emerge from my kitchen day in and day out. What they don’t see is everything that goes into running, what I aim to be a seamless operation. So, in answer to the question, “what is it really like?” I will attempt through this blog to bring you behind the scenes and let you decide if my job is, indeed, your dream.

I remember years ago posing this very question to the owner of an inn where I was staying. My question was met with a patronizing chuckle and an extremely negative description of the innkeeping profession. In hindsight, I can understand his reaction. Imagine several times a week people telling you that they want your career and you know they probably have no concept of exactly how hard your daily life is. Nobody really knows what is involved in innkeeping until they do it – I know I didn’t. So, it’s tempting to share with aspiring innkeepers the story about the overflowing toilet you dealt with the night before or the last minute cancellation that is unlikely to fill. But despite all that, I love my job and wouldn’t trade it for anything. I certainly wouldn’t talk anyone out of leaving a secure job to pursue their dream, but perhaps following this blog for awhile will shed some light on what it’s really like.

I should mention, before continuing, that I cannot in good faith bare all in this blog. Perhaps someday I will publish an anonymous book with all the sordid details of certain guests’ visits. And to be honest, 95% of the guests we host are very pleasant and we would welcome back time and time again. The 5% who fuel our comical repertoire of dinner party conversation, I’ll save for a more appropriate venue.

In the meantime, this blog will share our background, our smart moves and not so smart moves, and our day to day anecdotes which make our jobs both fun and trying. I am happy to answer any questions you may have along the way, so please feel free to comment. In addition to the dialogue on this blog, about.com has a wealth of information for aspiring innkeepers on their site.

English Holiday Afternoon Tea at the Captain's House Inn

With the holidays just around the corner, we look forward to serving our annual holiday afternoon tea menu soon. Relax in our decorated tea room and get in the holiday spirit. The menu features cucumber cups with smoked salmon pate, traditional Branston pickle with cheddar, mushroom pasties, mini English Triffle and a selection of desserts and scones (click here for the full menu). This menu is available every day from 3 to 5 pm, November 29th to December 29th, 2008 for $18.00 per person. For groups of six to 25, this festive menu is also available as a private luncheon, perfect for a holiday party. As always, year round luncheons are available every day, starting at 12:15pm, at $22.00 per person and reservations are required. Please visit our website or call us at 800.315.0728 with any questions or to make your reservation. Happy Holidays!