Mary White is a former securities broker with an MBA in Portfolio Management. She also happens to be the author of the popular book, ‘Running a Bed and Breakfast For Dummies’. Shifting gears in 1998, White and her brother sat down to create a way that inn guests could find the perfect getaway.
While it was only a few years ago, White recalls that the rise of the Internet was a challenging time to launch a Web-based bed and breakfast site, in large part due to the fact innkeepers had no idea what the Internet was. In a future article, you’ll learn how White created her popular book. Here you’ll see how she latched onto a new technology with BnBFinder.com.
1. You launched BnBFinder.com in 1998. What was the Internet like in those days -- and why did you think it would work for bed and breakfasts?
The Internet was just beginning to gain popularity, but everything was so fragmented then. If you did a search for ‘B & B’ plus ‘Hudson Valley’, the results would probably include farms and horses and everything else because at that point the Internet did not have key words and search results figured out. If you did a search, it wouldn’t have been a Google search since Google didn’t even exist.
My brother and I thought it would be a great idea to put a guidebook online. That’s what BnBFinder.com was initially supposed to be – an online guidebook. As things developed and the Web searches were perfected, we became a combination of a search engine and an online guidebook.
2. When you were getting started some people didn’t even know what the Internet was, did they?
When we tried to speak to innkeepers about putting a guidebook online, most innkeepers had no idea what we were talking about. Many of them were still saving up for a fax machine!
Even if an inn had a website, we usually didn’t link to it because the innkeepers didn’t have professional websites like the way they do now. They were getting free hosting that came with their dial up connection but across the top of their landing page was nothing but banner ads. I’ll never forget one inn had a banner ad for ‘Catch the Monkey’ and it was flashy and distracting and didn’t mention anything about the inn or the breakfast or the rooms, but innkeepers used ads like these because they got free hosting.
3. When did innkeepers start understanding the potential of the Internet?
We felt very strongly that we wanted to present B&Bs in a better light, and because few innkeepers owned their own Web address, in the beginning we gave inns a nice presence by creating a special URL for them. It was a professional web page with pictures and text.
We also suggested to innkeepers to leave a message on their answering machine and say “If you’d like to see pictures you can visit bnbfinder.com/myinn. After a couple of years of BnBFinder.com, we noticed that more innkeepers were beginning to create simple sites that were professionally done.
It’s amazing how fast things changed after that. Google is now a verb.
4. In hindsight, you and your brother seem to be futurists. How did you understand the potential of the Internet?
I knew I wanted to do something with the Internet. My background was as a securities broker and I have an MBA in Portfolio Management so my initial idea was to do formymoney.com which would deal with asset allocation and meeting your goals.
Around the same time, my brother was searching for a B&B in the Hudson Valley and he was determined he’d find an inn online. He refused to call the Chamber of Commerce but, in the end, he had to call the Chamber.
So he thought about it and said “I can’t find a B&B and you love B&Bs and travel, so why don’t we try to put something like this together and see where it goes?” In the beginning BnBFinder was more of an experiment to see if it would really take off or if it would just be a learning experience that would help with the creation of formymoney.com.
5. Obviously it’s been a success and led to your book Running a Bed and Breakfast For Dummies. Thirteen years later, what’s been the most rewarding part of BnBFinder.com?
The most important thing that I stand for and what BnBFinder.com stands for is that we understand that every inn is unique and every innkeeper is unique and all of our guests are unique.
So both the website and the book are really about creating the inn that is right for the innkepeper and right for the guests they want to attract.
