Just the same as for those who don't join their state assocations.
Jay, thank you for taking the time to outline what you have been working on for our industry. Your relevant leadership has certainly brought me back into the PAII fold. "Herding cats" comes to mind when I think about having to respond to the many diverse issues that you've had to deal with. Best wishes to you. Keep up your enthusiasm and your good work.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
Thanks again for your open and honest feedback. I would expect no less and appreciate all that you do for innkeeping.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
Thank you Jay for taking the time out to email us. We have joined at the lower level as I like to learn what I can from the forums, and with our expansion plans and only two rooms that was something that I could afford at this time.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
So Jay when you get time, perhaps after the conference is over; can you share with us exactly what changes Trip Advisor has made as a result of your negotiations?Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
I think it is a big step forward for PAII to decide what it's going to be and focus on that goal, rather than trying to be everything to everybody. There are enough directories out there fighting for the google rankings as it is.jkarennj said:
Thanks for clarifying that bit about the membership pricing. The model seems to be that the more education you want, the more you can get with an increasing cost of membership. With education as a primary focus, that's appropriate. And of course you won't see dramatic increases in membership right away - it takes awhile to turn the Titanic.jkarennj said:
Thank you for taking the time Jay.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
SO...you persuaded me. Your answers here are well reasoned, thoughtful, and completely non-defensive. I like the areas you are choosing to make the primary focus of the organization.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
Instead of quotes from dead presidents, PAII would benefit more from some instruction on how to turn critics into supporters as presented in this article.Thank you for taking the time Jay.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” --Theodore Roosevelt 26th President
.
Errr...you expressed criticism over some specific parts of the website (criticism I agree with by the way) and Jay specifically agreed with you and mentioned how improving that is in the works. So in my book, Jay handled that well.Instead of quotes from dead presidents, PAII would benefit more from some instruction on how to turn critics into supporters as presented in this article.Thank you for taking the time Jay.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” --Theodore Roosevelt 26th President
.
For Nonprofit Organizations: How to Handle Online Criticism[/h3]
- In other words, what you do is going to be more powerful than what you say.
.
- If the critic is pointing out something your organization should have done, but didn't, for whatever reason, accept the criticism. Consider offering a straightforward and sincere apology, and details on how the problem will be addressed. In short, keep this in mind at all times: when people care enough to criticize, they need to be taken seriously, and you need to show that you have taken them seriously. A timely, personal and sincere apology could have turned me around and made me feel really positive toward the organization.
"We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin."Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
Yep agree with you!! Just more of SP's sour grapes here. No one can remove a bad review..so just get over itErrr...you expressed criticism over some specific parts of the website (criticism I agree with by the way) and Jay specifically agreed with you and mentioned how improving that is in the works. So in my book, Jay handled that well.Instead of quotes from dead presidents, PAII would benefit more from some instruction on how to turn critics into supporters as presented in this article.Thank you for taking the time Jay.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” --Theodore Roosevelt 26th President
.
For Nonprofit Organizations: How to Handle Online Criticism[/h3]
- In other words, what you do is going to be more powerful than what you say.
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- If the critic is pointing out something your organization should have done, but didn't, for whatever reason, accept the criticism. Consider offering a straightforward and sincere apology, and details on how the problem will be addressed. In short, keep this in mind at all times: when people care enough to criticize, they need to be taken seriously, and you need to show that you have taken them seriously. A timely, personal and sincere apology could have turned me around and made me feel really positive toward the organization.
But you aren't refering to that are you? You're going back to your "PAII is ineffective because they didn't get my specific bad/fraudulent TripAdvisor review removed" rant. PAII isn't likely to ever serve that feature because it is not scalable to their entire membership. They would get completely swamped with dealing with every individual bad tripadvisor review that they would be completely ineffective at everything else. It would increase their membership tremendously, as every B&B with a bad review would pay $89 just to have their bad reviews battled, but it is not sustainable. They need to focus on bigger picture influence as they have done and seem to be continuing to do.
.
In the first sentence, even."We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin."Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
IMHO, the holy grail is hidden in this paragraph.
.
There is no question SweetiePie felt PAII disrespected her with regard to how we handled her TripAdvisor grievance. When we opened it up to the industry to send us their grievances, we certainly encountered a wide variety of opinions and levels of emotion...and by stepping out publicly to take on this issue, we also encountered a wide variety of expectations of what PAII could or should do about individual grievances. Some folks just shared their stories with no real expectation for change, and some others were happy to FedEx to our office a new flamethrower that I was supposed to take with me to the TripAdvisor office.Instead of quotes from dead presidents, PAII would benefit more from some instruction on how to turn critics into supporters as presented in this article.Thank you for taking the time Jay.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” --Theodore Roosevelt 26th President
.
For Nonprofit Organizations: How to Handle Online Criticism[/h3]
- In other words, what you do is going to be more powerful than what you say.
.
- If the critic is pointing out something your organization should have done, but didn't, for whatever reason, accept the criticism. Consider offering a straightforward and sincere apology, and details on how the problem will be addressed. In short, keep this in mind at all times: when people care enough to criticize, they need to be taken seriously, and you need to show that you have taken them seriously. A timely, personal and sincere apology could have turned me around and made me feel really positive toward the organization.
Swirt, I'm really disappointed in you. You're the last person I would expect to try and explain a situaion by putting words in someone else's mouth. The test of the maturity of any forum is its ability to handle dissent and I'm afraid this one has failed badly.Errr...you expressed criticism over some specific parts of the website (criticism I agree with by the way) and Jay specifically agreed with you and mentioned how improving that is in the works. So in my book, Jay handled that well.Instead of quotes from dead presidents, PAII would benefit more from some instruction on how to turn critics into supporters as presented in this article.Thank you for taking the time Jay.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” --Theodore Roosevelt 26th President
.
For Nonprofit Organizations: How to Handle Online Criticism[/h3]
- In other words, what you do is going to be more powerful than what you say.
.
- If the critic is pointing out something your organization should have done, but didn't, for whatever reason, accept the criticism. Consider offering a straightforward and sincere apology, and details on how the problem will be addressed. In short, keep this in mind at all times: when people care enough to criticize, they need to be taken seriously, and you need to show that you have taken them seriously. A timely, personal and sincere apology could have turned me around and made me feel really positive toward the organization.
But you aren't refering to that are you? You're going back to your "PAII is ineffective because they didn't get my specific bad/fraudulent TripAdvisor review removed" rant. PAII isn't likely to ever serve that feature because it is not scalable to their entire membership. They would get completely swamped with dealing with every individual bad tripadvisor review that they would be completely ineffective at everything else. It would increase their membership tremendously, as every B&B with a bad review would pay $89 just to have their bad reviews battled, but it is not sustainable. They need to focus on bigger picture influence as they have done and seem to be continuing to do.
.
SWIRT said nothing out of line. And, quite honestly many of us are all just plain tired of having Sp whine on and on about her situation. As a close friend always tells me "put on your big girl panties and deal with it."Swirt, I'm really disappointed in you. You're the last person I would expect to try and explain a situaion by putting words in someone else's mouth. The test of the maturity of any forum is its ability to handle dissent and I'm afraid this one has failed badly.Errr...you expressed criticism over some specific parts of the website (criticism I agree with by the way) and Jay specifically agreed with you and mentioned how improving that is in the works. So in my book, Jay handled that well.Instead of quotes from dead presidents, PAII would benefit more from some instruction on how to turn critics into supporters as presented in this article.Thank you for taking the time Jay.Hi everyone,
Sorry this will be relatively short and sweet. We have the New England Innkeeping Show starting on Monday, and if you’ve ever been in event management, then you know what the final week is like!
I want to address a few of the issues brought up on this thread. And thanks for contributing to the discussion. Most of you know that we are serious listeners at PAII. We might not change everything based on every piece of criticism or advice, but we very serious about listening to all opinions. And, we have made many changes at PAII since I came on board 2.5 years ago – all of came as a result of feedback from members and non-members. In fact, as you might know, a task force of non-members from this very forum helped me shape our new membership model. (Thanks again to all who participated – we’re seeing a great uptick in membership numbers since launching the new menu of options). I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles over the past two years, visiting nearly every state and regional B&B conference in the US and Canada (only a handful left that I haven’t attended). The point of this is to build bridges will all the allied associations out there and to LISTEN to what both innkeepers and associations on the ground have to say about the industry, PAII and the challenges that we all face.
The new PAII web site at www.innkeeping.org
It’s true – not everyone likes the new design. That’s ok. Generally, we feel it’s a lot better than the old web site. The software company we chose to host our new web site and database has a list of about 20 templates from which we could have chosen for our new site. This one gave us the most flexibility to post our own content, links, etc. We’re going to take a look from time-to-time at the template options to see if a change makes sense. I know the site is very busy. There’s a lot of information we want to have on the home page, including industry events, latest news, top priorities (the middle section) and links to navigate throughout the site. We never intended the site to be as simple as, say, the home page of a good B&B site. They’re apples and oranges. And, the site is not intended to be a consumer directory. It’s an association membership directory, so that people in our association can find innkeepers, vendors and other associations. The directory search tool is not good. I’m working with the software company to give clients (like PAII) more flexibility with designing the search tool, because one size does not fit all (they have over 600 clients). We’re stuck with that right now, but this company is very good about making changes based on good, logical client feedback. The social networking features of the new site are starting to catch on. Like Facebook, www.innkeeping.org allows users to form/join groups, post content to “walls” in those groups, have “friends” (called “connections”), chat live with connections, subscribe to just about any are of the site for updates, get daily digests of the forum discussions emailed to you, etc. It’s very feature-rich – just a matter of figuring out to simplify it and make it more intuitive to use. We’ll continue to work on it.
PAII as a B&B directory
This has long been an issue of discussion in our association – should PAII develop and support a consumer-oriented B&B directory? There have been fits and starts at us having one, but when I came on board in June 2007, I put the kibosh on the project. I didn’t think having such a directory fit with our mission, and I wasn’t interested in spending the great majority of our time and energy supporting a directory that competed with the 12+ national directories that were already out there in our industry. Nevertheless, there’s always been a restless crowd of innkeepers (some on our board too) who want us to still have a directory – even if it doesn’t promise to compete head-to-head with the likes of bbonline, bnbfinder, iloveinns, etc. Without a doubt, we often heard from members who were not renewing (at the previous $250 level) that “if PAII had a consumer directory, we would probably stick around.” The question really is – would they stick around if PAII had a directory…or if we had an EFFECTIVE directory that showed up on Google searches, produced reservations, etc. To make a national B&B directory successful, we would either have to reallocate all of our staff time to this project alone, or figure out how to double our staff to make it happen. The directories mentioned above do nothing but try to make their directories work, so there’s no fooling about what kind of commitment it would take. So, we’ve backed away from that issue and focused more on networking, education, lobbying and vendor discounts for innkeepers. NOW, that all being said – we’re working on building a PAII B&B directory.I’ll explain more in a minute.
$79 membership and what that gets you
First of all, you should know the $79 Silver Membership option turns into $89 on November 16. We’ve been running a special since October 5. Likewise, the $169 Gold Membership turns into $199 and the $259 Platinum Membership turns into $289. Someone mentioned that you might not get member pricing on the conference at the $79 level. You do. All members get to pay the PAII member pricing for conference registrations. The major difference between Silver and the higher levels has to do with our monthly webinars. Gold Members have access to the webinars at no extra fee (Silver Members have to pay $49 for each webinar if they want to attend or get the recording). Platinum Members get the webinars too, plus they get 10% off the annual conference registration and they get to take part in live, online evening chats once a month on topics of interest. The November webinar and “Platinum Chat” will be about gift cards – the ins/outs, legal issues, options in the market, best practices, etc. Just in time for the holiday season! By the way, if you can’t attend the live webinar, you will still get a link to the recording, so you can watch/listen on your own time. You can watch it on the web or download it to your iWhatever. The bottom line reason we lowered our price to $89 is because we know how important it is to have large numbers. We can be more effective when we have 8,000 members. We heard loud and clear that if we had a membership option for under $100, that more innkeepers would join and more would stick around. It just wasn’t a great value at $250 (the average ticket price before the changes). I wasn’t going to keep my head in the sand about that – we had to do something, and we did. And it wasn’t just a matter of dropping our price, we changed the membership model completely. We’re taking a risk by doing this, but it’s nice having an inexpensive option in this economy and we think it will help grow our membership in the short and long term. To “SweetiePie’s” comment about lowering the price “hasn’t done the trick”…it’s only been one month since we launched the new membership model. It’s going to take time.
I can understand why innkeepers in the past dropped out of PAII – for a number of years we lacked effective leadership and direction. We’re working our tails off to remedy that situation and to achieve higher numbers than we ever have in the past. We’re working on some initiatives that will hopefully benefit the ENTIRE bed and breakfast industry – not just PAII members. In fact, that’s the philosophy behind sending the magazine to all B&Bs in our database – member or not. We think some things are important enough to go beyond the member wall.
A new campaign
I alluded to PAII working on building our own B&B directory. The purpose of it would not be to stand alone and compete with other directories; it’s to be part of something bigger we are working on. There is no industry-wide effort going on right now to get more people to stay at B&Bs. There are individual efforts happening by folks like bedandbreakfast.com, bnbfinder.com, iloveinns.com and others to get good press out there for B&Bs – but ultimately those efforts are intended to get eyeballs back at their own web sites, so that their respective member B&Bs (not necessarily just the greater industry) will possibly get more leads, reservations, etc. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But, there is no real effort happening on behalf of the ENTIRE industry to get our product into the consciousness of the people who don’t consider B&Bs when traveling. A survey we did last spring revealed that the number 1 reason people who don’t stay at B&Bs don’t stay at B&Bs is…it doesn’t even cross their minds when booking travel! About 50% of “inn-don’t-goers” (as opposed to inn-goers) said B&Bs don’t even register in their minds as an option when booking travel. We at PAII have started the development of a true grassroots PR campaign to convince more travelers they should stay at B&Bs. It’s a beast of a project to undertake, and we’re being as deliberate as we can about what we think we can accomplish, but nevertheless we think it’s important; important enough to get the ball rolling. There are those in our industry that say we don’t have the resources to pull off an effective PR campaign for our industry. I won’t lie – it will never be anything like Got Milk? or Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner. We don’t have those resources in our industry. But we certainly can be a consolidating source of all the good press that’s out there on B&Bs, we can deliver a message about why B&Bs can be the preferred choice of lodging for all kinds of travelers and today’s technology can allow us to stay fresh with our campaign’s content and outreach capabilities. We want it to be THE INDUSTRY’s neutral ground on which to tell all the great stories and provide the many reasons to stay at B&Bs. If we build such a web site for this campaign, everyone on our planning task force feels there should be (among other choices) a way for visitors to find PAII properties – hence the PAII directory within the campaign site. I won’t go into all the details here; we hope to provide some kind of preview into the campaign at the upcoming Innkeeping Show in Austin.
Obviously, we think all innkeepers should support TODAY’s PAII for many reasons. We’ll likely never have 100% of the industry in our membership; in fact, most national trade associations never top 40% penetration of their entire marketplace (the exceptions are usually associations that provide mandatory credentialing, like medical-related associations). As the job of an innkeeper continually gets tougher and tougher, and as the world around us changes more quickly, the need for a formidable association like PAII becomes more important. Everyone is going to make their individual value judgment on whether or not it’s worth $89 to not only support PAII’s efforts, but also to get something in return for you personally or professionally.
We’ve launched the new Key Value Program, in which over 50 vendor members are offering standing deals/discounts to PAII members. Our educational communications have very high open rates, and we assume it’s because innkeepers are getting something out of the educational and news articles we share weekly and monthly. Our webinars have been well-received, and our conferences continue to have over 95% stellar reviews from attendees. The advocacy work we are doing is paying off – the Travel Promotion Act will soon pass both houses of Congress (I was in DC lobbying for it), and I’m certain that TripAdvisor has made some good changes to their web site – and more are coming. I know for a fact that TA is doing more than just giving me a polite ear – specific recommendations I’ve made about their site for change have happened…nowhere yet near what I’d like to see or what some irate innkeepers would like to see, but changes have happened and will continue to happen, as long as I have the senior executive-level attention. Their CEO will be on stage with me next Tuesday morning at our New England Innkeeping Show, answering tough questions about their site, policies and direction. Trust me when I say Stephen Kaufer has no obligation to PAII to come to town and sit in the hot seat in front of 250+ innkeepers. He’s doing so, because he values my participation in helping to make their site a better tool for the B&B industry.
Enough, my dear supporters and critics. You are ultimately the final judge and jury about PAII’s value in this B&B industry and for your business. Membership is on the rise…the word on the street is once again positive (with a few obvious exceptions herewith)…and we’re getting things done. I invite any and all innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers to join the growing ranks at www.innkeeping.org.
I guess this was bit longer than I anticipated..
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” --Theodore Roosevelt 26th President
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For Nonprofit Organizations: How to Handle Online Criticism[/h3]
- In other words, what you do is going to be more powerful than what you say.
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- If the critic is pointing out something your organization should have done, but didn't, for whatever reason, accept the criticism. Consider offering a straightforward and sincere apology, and details on how the problem will be addressed. In short, keep this in mind at all times: when people care enough to criticize, they need to be taken seriously, and you need to show that you have taken them seriously. A timely, personal and sincere apology could have turned me around and made me feel really positive toward the organization.
But you aren't refering to that are you? You're going back to your "PAII is ineffective because they didn't get my specific bad/fraudulent TripAdvisor review removed" rant. PAII isn't likely to ever serve that feature because it is not scalable to their entire membership. They would get completely swamped with dealing with every individual bad tripadvisor review that they would be completely ineffective at everything else. It would increase their membership tremendously, as every B&B with a bad review would pay $89 just to have their bad reviews battled, but it is not sustainable. They need to focus on bigger picture influence as they have done and seem to be continuing to do.
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To attack anyone who disagrees with you is very immature in my opinion. Perhaps that explains why with over 500 members, so few are willing to interact.
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Yep I admire that about you..but that is why you are in your position...
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