Anyone run a bed and breakfast? Thoughts about running one.

In My Humble Opinion
1

Mrs. rainy and I are considering purchasing a property and turning it into a B&B. And we have several questions about the specifics of how innkeepers handle situations where their private lives and the duties of inn keeping mingle.

Anybody on the Dope run a bed and breakfast?

Anyone know of a really good forum for questions I might have? I’ve already posted at

bedandbreakfast . com

and

about . com.
We are slightly hampered by never having stayed at a B&B ourselves. Or if you just want to take a crack at how you’d handle these situtions if you were running a B&B, go right ahead.

Thanks in advance for any answers provided. I will assume all answers provided are IANAL, IANABBIK, and no answers will be construed to be advice on my specific situation :slight_smile:

-rainy

1 – In our area, you don’t have to have a health department inspected kitchen to run a B&B and part of that is due to the fact that you are only serving breakfast, and only to guests. So…you have guests, and you are preparing the family’s meal and a guest who is just relaxing around the inn comments “That smells delicious.”
Well if this person was a friend or relative dropping by our house, I’d immediately invite them to dine with the family. But they aren’t family, they are paying guests. How do you handle that? Certain things come to mind; they haven’t paid you for dinner – if they did this all week, you would be out a significant sum. You can’t legally charge them for dinner.

2 – Our children have a school function that means we will all be out of the house for several hours, and we have guests. We have informed them we will be away, and everyone’s breakfast has been served, the inn is clean and all guests have what they need for the day. When we leave, we obviously can’t lock up, and the guests cannot be tasked with locking up. Is the house just left open? How do you handle security? Similarly at night, you never know how late your guests will be returning, is the door just open at all times when guests are about?

3 – When a guest needs something; change the time for the next morning’s breakfast, they forgot their toothbrush, whatever – how do they contact you, literally? Say you’ve retired for the evening into your ‘private’ quarters of the house. Do they knock at your door? Do you have a phone system similar to hotel where they call the “front desk?”

4 – I keep reading on different individual B&B web pages how they might include a bottle of wine in a basket for their guests. Is a license to serve alcohol required to do so? Are you then obligated to “check guests ID” to insure they are of legal age to drink? Are you exposing yourself to prosecution if a guest drank alcohol you provided then was involved in a DUI incident of some sort?

5 – Do you return items left in the room? Do you call to inform the person they left items? Do you have them pay the cost of shipping? It might seem strange to ask if you even contact them, but are you running the risk of invading someone’s privacy by calling

Innkeeper “Hello, Mrs. Smith, this is rainy, you and your husband stayed at our B&B last week and he left his high blood pressure medicine in the bathroom.”
Mrs. Smith “My husband said he was at a conference last weekend…what did the tramp he showed up at your place with look like?! I bet it was his secretary.”

2

Do you have any experience as hoteliers? If not, I suggest that you find a way of watching a few episodes of Hotel Inspector on BBC America. In this series an experienced hotelier tries to help owners of failing hotels/B&B/guest houses to turn them around. Almost invariably, the hotels are run by people with no experience of the industry but who thought it would be a good idea to blow their life savings on buying an hotel. And then they haven’t a clue.

3

Yup, that’d be us. I’ll look those up.

I do have a little restaurant experience, so there’s the breakfast part of it. :slight_smile:

4

I read an article not too long ago about B&B owners. All but a few had to work real jobs to make ends meet, esp. if their business was seasonal. I’ll see if I can remember where and link to it if I find it.

Any hospitality-industry venture is risky, and that risk increases exponentially when the owners/investors are inexperienced. Please take a LOT of time to research and plan before launching anything – the questions you’re asking are a good start, but there’s going to be even more to it.

5

Perhaps you should try staying in some B&B’s. Just a thought.

I have never stayed at a B&B in which the guest rooms were not in some way separated from the family’s living quarters, for example by having a separate entrance, or having all guestrooms on one side of the kitchen & all family quarters on the other, or something. It would be really weird to be literally and obviously sharing someone’s home with them.

Question #2 - guests get a key - you get the kind of locks that lock behind you automatically.

As to your Question #3, it’s quite simple. Remind them on check-in that you are happy to accomodate special requests but they must be made by X hour because you go to bed. People who stay at B&Bs are not expecting all night bellhop service.

6

Basically you have to be the type of people that like limited privacy and enjoy company.

It’s very difficult to seperate that, I would say it’s almost impossible.

Local inspecations vary but are not hard to cope with. Breakfasts are easy enough if you make it so, or complicated if you make it so. The thing about breakfast is you have to make it so it has a bit of variation but not too much or you’ll screw yourself over.

Most B&B operaters like to talk so the best way is to stay at B&B at areas similar to the type that you plan to open your B&B. Finally you may be able to make a living but you’re not gonna get rich money-wise.

But if you’re the type of person that likes company and doesn’t put all that great value on privacy ('cause it will be limited) you’d be OK

7

Without commenting on the business aspects of a B&B, the perspective of a customer who’s stayed at several B&B’s:

1 - I should think a “Why, thank you!” as a response would be sufficient. Guests don’t expect dinner. Though I have been to one B&B where they would sometimes leave out a dessert at night for customers who were staying more than one night (so, we got there on a Tuesday night, they left out something on Wednesday night for us). We never expected it, but it was a really nice thought (and definitely made us decide that we were totally going to stay there again next time we were in the area).

3 - I think several places we’ve stayed at have had a separate line for B&B communication (that’s like calling the “front desk”) – we’ve never knocked at the private quarters, that would be weird!

5 - All the B&B’s we’ve ever stayed at have asked during booking for a phone number they can use to communicate with us. Once we had to leave a message because we realized we were going to get there late, and they called us back with instructions. I should imagine that you wouldn’t run into problems with a phone number you asked them to provide; if they were going to have problems they shouldn’t’ve given you the number.

8

Yeah, it seems strange to me that you are considering operating a B&B if you have never even stayed in one.

My two cents:

#1. I guess this could happen, but as a reasonable person I cannot imagine fishing for a free or unplanned for meal. As mentioned above a simple “Thanks!” should suffice. If they were to press simply explain that it would be illegal.

#2. For the most part, as a guest I have been provided with a key to the house and to my room.

#3. When another guest had part of the ceiling collapse in the middle of the night at one place, they went and knocked, so I guess there wasn’t a phone system there.

#4. Don’t know.

#5. I should think so. For small cheap to ship items, it would be nice not to haggle over being reimbursed. If they forgot a whole suitcase or something, that is another story. And if Mr. Cheater is stupid enough to give you his home phone number, that is his problem.

9

This is good stuff, so keep it coming.

We are not quite as niave about all aspects of this as opening post makes it seem. While we have never stayed at a B&B we have travelled extensively for business, staying at literally hundreds of hotels big and small. We have also operated a small business. For seven years we were owner operators, and even though it wasn’t in the hospitality industry it did deal directly with the public and we garnered a reputation for the way in which we dealt with customers. We know how we’d like to to treated, and run our business (or might run a B&B) accordingly.

All in all, the above might just be a rationalization.

We stumbled upon this property as we were looking around to see if any great deals had flaoted to the top in the soft real estate market. This property is a foreclosure, and to our eyes a fantastic deal. So we are trying to move on it before it gets snapped up. I’m working on a business plan now, and a lot will depend on financing. But, we could be living in a much larger home, will the added income of the B&B (we will both be working still, as I work from home) for less than we are currently paying on our house’s mortgage. I assure you we are carefully considering our options, and discussing things with people we respect - like the Dope - helps us fine tune our assessment of things. I plan on staying at some local B&Bs, but I’m also aware that if the deal on this piece of property is as good as I think it is, it won’t last long.

10

I have stayed at quite a few, and I can’t stress enough that you have to like company. Every one (but one, and that was more like a small hotel) that I’ve stayed at, I’ve practically had to peel the owners off me, they were so interested in me and wanted me to stay up late and chat, etc. Pie and sherry at 10! Here is our library, use it all you want! Etc. You should also be prepared to give suggestions on where to eat locally and other interesting things to do, because your guests will ask. They want to have a local experience, that’s why they stay at a B&B.

Now of course you don’t have to be a pest and if you’re a sensitive person you’ll see if you’re being overbearing. But truly, it seems to me the people that own these things do it because they’re totally People People.

Some extras I’ve experienced: mini fridges stocked with water and soft drinks; TV; no TV (this is sometimes touted as a benefit); fully stocked dvd library; jacuzzi-type bathtubs.

My husband left his college ring one time, and they were happy to mail it. He was freaked because he’d had it, well, since college. :wink:

I love staying at bed and breakfast places.

11

I think the most important thing is to make the guests welcome. One B & B I stayed in in Sackville, New Brunswick was run by a grumpy old lady who left you feeling hungry at breakfast ("What, you want TWO slices of toast) and was generally unaccommodating. She also charged $2 a page to receive a fax of a half dozen pages that my wife needed. That’s unreasonable and I wouldn’t recommend that B & B to anybody.

One of the nicest B & Bs I ever stayed in was in the then god-forsaken place of Forks, WA, now famous as the town in the US that gets the least amount of sunshine. They were very nice and, if they are still there, they are now getting very wealthy as Forks has become the Mecca for all the vampire fans.