Part 2: First mover advantage and future site plans

And was it difficult to present, in the early years, the value of the Internet to the bed and breakfast innkeepers? To get them to see the value of going online?
The funny thing is five years ago in 1996, we were at the national bed and breakfast conference, the largest one there is and 99% of my time - we were the only Internet company there - was spent explaining to innkeepers what the Internet was and how it was going to change their business. Today the Internet is the number one way that innkeepers get new business.

You guys were the first movers, and there's a lot of debate about whether that really is an advantage or not. Do you believe in that advantage?
I definitely believe in that advantage. Innkeepers on average get a piece a mail a day to be in the directories, be online at a different site, etc. and they don't listen to them. They trust us, they're tied to us because we've spent five years going to all the conferences, building up a good client rapport with the innkeepers and respecting their needs.

We had a strong suspicion that the Internet would change the B&B industry. Travel is number one on the Web for a reason. People are used to buying travel products remotely. You're not going to buy a TV remotely, you want to see it, hear it etc. But the number one thing sold online right now is airline tickets. That's a commodity.

Each bed and breakfast is unique and each property is different. So the bed and breakfast arena is the perfect fragmented market that is an information rich decision-making process, which works best via the Internet.

I won't even look at a hotel if it doesn't have online booking, do you encourage B&B clients to have a website for customers to access?
It's funny, when we first started innkeepers kept saying, "I don't want techno geeks staying at my property." They thought that would be the only people who were using the computer to book reservations. They just didn't have a clear vision of who was using online booking in the early stages.

It was the same thing as 800 numbers years ago, when they didn't see why they should have 800 numbers. And today, with innkeepers, they now see if they put their bed and breakfast online they get 80 to 90 percent of their bookings via the Web. So if they don't have that listing on the Web, they're losing out to their competitors.

How do you top yourself at this point, how do you get more value added to the process? What is the challenge for you?
There's still so much we can do with our existing company. We're consolidating the entire industry, providing a platform for vendors that want to meet innkeepers. We have an email that goes out to all the innkeepers so they want to be part of that. Inns for Sale, bed and breakfast gift certificates. We've got other opportunities for innkeepers to get more promotion for their site, and we're doing online booking. There are tons of things we still have left to do and create. That's what makes this business so exciting.

Thanks for all your "inn-sight" Eric!