Carl Glassman - How to Start & Run Your Own Bed & Breakfast Inn

The Inn Business

The inn business is not small. There are no certain estimates, but a good guess is that the United States has more than 25,000 bed-and-breakfast inns, country inns, and homestays. Another measure is an estimate of rooms rented annually: at average rates of occupancy, approximately 15 million for inns. Contrast that with the 10 million rentals in 1991 for Best Western, the largest North American motel chain, with 3,300 properties.

Another measure is the number of sole proprietors. Accord-ing to American Demographics magazine, about 10 million Americans work in their own unincorporated businesses. The largest number are in services (30 percent), and the largest number of those321,000are in lodging places: bed-and-breakfast inns, boardinghouses, trailer parks, camps, and similar residences.

As it grows, the business is becoming more professionalized. What was once a random collection of guest houses is emerging into a field that has professional associations and an increasing interest in standards. Now, more than ever, it is important for new innkeepers to be armed with much more information than those in the vanguard had.

The opening and maturing of the inn business was much like the settling of the Old West. It started with generally unsettled territory and a notion that something was out there. Then came the pathfinders, the few brave souls who started letting rooms in their houses after all the tourist homes of the 1940s and 1950s were displaced by the genius of Kemmet Wilson, founder of Holiday Inns.

Then there were the pioneers, who had a better notion of what they wanted to be doing. They started the small inns that Norman Simpson first wrote about in the 1970s in Country Inns and Back Roads. Then came the homesteaders like Carl and Dinie in the late 1970s and the settlers like Owen and me in the mid-1980s. When Laura Ashley starts creating signature inns and when Relais et Chateaux (the international luxury chateaucountry house hotel chain) expands into North America, then our business is no longer a cottage industry.

So its a good idea to begin with a description of what we mean by the term inn (corrupted from use by so many joints) and an examination of the trends in this diverse and burgeoning field.

DEFINITIONS

Theres a good deal of argumentnot always friendlyabout the terminology used to describe inns. Well start with the generally used terms and their ordinary meanings:

Bed-and-Breakfast Home

Also called a homestay or host home, this is a private home run part-time by its owners for a little extra money or as a way to meet people. It is the closest to the English bed and breakfast and was the start of the whole business in the United States. Small B&B homestays can be as professionally run as any full-service inn, but they are basically homes with an extra room where you stay cheek-by-jowl with the family. Breakfast is included and often served with the family. Homestays do not have a business sign and often are not regulated. Their business comes through overflow referrals from inns or bookings from a reservation service. For a commission, these services market and book reservations, often abiding by strict guest profiles provided by the hosts, such as nonsmoking Christian motor-cyclists or married couples with an interest in opera.

Bed-and-Breakfast Inn

This is the professionally run four to eighteen-room inn in which the owner-innkeeper is resident on the property (or very close by) and considers herself or himself to be a professional innkeeper. There may be assistant innkeepers, but the main contact of the guest is with the owner. B&B inns are usually historic or architecturally interesting buildings and are considered legitimate businesses. They have zoning board approval, collect sales and occupancy taxes, have use and occupancy permits, and maintain commercial insurance coverage. Breakfast is always included, though it may be continental, and there is a public gathering space for guests. B&B inns are regulated, often quite heavily, by state and local laws.

Country Inn

Also called full-service inns or sometimes just inns (surely you didnt think we were going to make this easy), country inns range in size from five to twenty rooms and can be in the city as well as the country. The country inn has a restaurant that serves meals other than breakfast. Breakfast may not be included in the rate, though it usually is. Because of the restaurant, and often a bar, these are the most heavily regulated of inns.