AirBnB is fast loosing its reputation with both hosts and guests. Sales are down quarter over quarter. Policies are ever changing in favour of guests. This has been amplified with most provinces implementing strict STR rules in 2024. If you are tired of waiting in queue to argue with poor English speaking OTA (Online Travel Agencies) support centers with rigid guest-centric policies, and paying from 3 to up to 20% commissions while you clean toilets perhaps it's time to look at alternatives that put you back in charge.
We here at Birds of a Feather B&B neither rely, nor are tethered to any OTA. Approximately 80% of our bookings come through our own website; the one you're currently on. The remaining 20% come from the OTAs and all reservations are managed in one PMS - property management system. We've been in this business since 1997 and are consistently both #1 on TripAdvisor and amongst the highest tier of revenue per room. Read our case study which includes the evolution of my subject matter expertise below. If you wish to attain independence from OTAs I offer professional consulting, training and support.
STR (Short Term Rental) CASE STUDY for Birds of a Feather Victoria B&B
The Challenge
Birds of a Feather was established in February 1997. It is located in Colwood which is one of 13 modest sized communities that together are collectively referred to as Victoria. We are approximately 20 minutes from the downtown Victoria tourist-centric core. In February we joined and attended a local B&B Association where we learned that deadlines for listings and advertisements in Tourism BC and other print media were many months earlier. Other B&B innkeepers kindly offered to send us their July to September overflow for us to get started. That left us with 2 challenges.
- how to make people aware of us and not loose an entire season;
- once aware, how to convince them to drive the extra 20 minutes to reach us.
The Solutions
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Guests finding us online through our own web site
In early 1997 there were no B&B websites; zero. Expedia and Booking.com were only months old, and AirBnB didn't come around until 2007. In February 1997 I built a 5 page website using the html editor in Netscape Gold web browser from AOL for Birds of a Feather. It turned out to be the very first B&B website in Canada, and one of only a handful in the world. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine didn't index 1997 and 1998 but here is an archive link to the 1999 version and here is the following version at this link.A few years earlier I had taught myself how to build what today we call a Blog for a wrongful conviction case I was working on pro-bono. Up to then we had relied on faxing, snail mail and long distance phone calls to the media to create public awareness and engage public support for the Department of Justice to reopen these kind of cases. Unlike in the USA where you could, for example present previously unavailable exculpatory DNA evidence to the courts, in Canada it starts with a section 690 CC application to the Justice Minister. Without drumming up a groundswell of public support it often went too slow, or no where at all.
Two weeks after the site went live we received our first booking. By June we were sending our overflow to other local B&B's. They were stunned that we even had a reservation, let alone overflow, and then in June already!
I would go on to build a dozen websites for free for members of our Association which segued in to the creation of NorthStudio.com in 1998. Here is an 2001 archival link to for a snapshot of an early version of the site. If you click the portfolio link it will show how we quickly became accommodation marketing experts. One of our in-house projects was an OTA we built ourselves called LodgingChannel.com which worked very well until 2013. Of course in hindsight we wish we had switched from the directory platform to "AirBnB" type platform :)
North Studio would go on to spawn Stikky Media, Q Academy and a fully accredited Q College. All that started with building a web site in 1997 to market our B&B.
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Convincing guests to book with us
Being 20 minutes outside of the downtown tourist core we needed to convince folks it was worth the drive. In 1997 Google didn't exist yet and browsers like Yahoo, Alta Vista and Netscape did not have the functionality that today exists on Google. They were directory based just like our own Lodging Channel.
We inventoried all the nearby attractions which included Hatley Castle next door, Fort Rodd Hill & Fisgard Lighthouse at the other end of the ocean lagoon which itself is a migratory bird sanctuary. We also have many trails in many parks in all directions. We built individual web sites for each of them such as this example HatleyCastle.com with all "roads" leading back to Birds of a Feather. Before Google really took off with map based While we still get some indirect bookings from these sites
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