[00:00:00] Hi, it's Karen here. I'm the founder and owner of Bed and Breakfast Academy. I help aspiring and existing B& B owners to create a B& B lifestyle they're going to love living and to attract guests who become loyal and repeat customers. If you're new to this podcast, hello.
I've been running B& B Academy since 2006, and I also ran my own B& B Hopton House here in Shropshire for 17 years. I have trained many hundreds of B& B owners over the years. Pre COVID, I ran classroom training courses, but now I deliver all of my training online, apart from the occasional. tourism marketing course which I run locally.
The great advantage of training online is that you can do the training at your own pace. You can sign up today and start straight away and I'm able to deliver much more consistent content. Yesterday I sent an email out to my subscribers and then thought it was about [00:01:00] time I recorded a podcast as it's been a while. I checked the date of the last podcast and couldn't quite believe it was March and we're now in July.
This year is really getting away with me. I blame the UK weather which has been so bad this year that it still feels like it's spring. Then, that evening, I got a comment on Instagram asking if I'd given up on the podcast. So I think the universe may be telling me something. I have been continuing to blog a couple of times a month, which is a bit less labor intensive.
As a one person company, recording a podcast Take a lot of time. I have to write it, then record it, and then have to remember how the software works. Edit it, upload it, create the graphics. Anyway, that's enough excuses. At least with a podcast, I don't need to do my hair and put my makeup on. In this podcast, I'm going to talk through what to put in your welcome basket.
Note that I'm using air quotes when I say basket. I'll talk a [00:02:00] bit more about that in a moment. If you prefer to read rather than listen, there is also a bonus. Accompanying blog posts at bnbacademy. co. uk forward slash blog, as well as hundreds, well not hundreds, over 160 other blog posts there. Whenever we go away on holiday to a cottage, hotel or a B& B, as soon as I get in the room I'm busy searching around to see what goodies there are.
You know, are there going to be nice toiletries? What's on the tea tray? Are there homemade biscuits and fresh milk? What's in the welcome folder? Ooh, a loofah mitt thingy! I'm sure I'm not alone in doing this. Unless we're staying in a very utilitarian premiere in bed for the night, I think most guests like to be surprised with a few extras.
So in this podcast, I'm going to talk you through whether you should provide a B& B welcome basket, what to put in it, why you should review that welcome basket offering [00:03:00] regularly, and is it a good idea to offer different welcome baskets to different tiers of guests, and should you charge for B& B welcome baskets?
So just a heads up, the blog post is actually a sponsored blog post. The blog relies on the support and trust of readers and listeners like you. And I do collaborate with some companies that I like and respect. Spec such as out of Eden, and only recommend products that I have actually bought, or I would buy myself or have been recommended by other hospitality providers that I trust.
This allows me to keep providing all of this valuable content to you for free. So I will be recommending some products from out of Eden in this podcast. And if you want to find more about my collaboration with out Eden, there is a. Blog post called where to shop for your hospitality supplies over on bnvacademy.
co. uk forward slash blog. So when I [00:04:00] talk about a welcome basket, I don't mean just a basket piled with everything That looks nice and out of Eden have a great selection of baskets What I'm really talking about are all the little extras you provide for your guests Whether you give your guests a welcome basket or not Depends on your pricing and what type of guests you cater to.
I think the more expensive and luxurious accommodation, the more attention to detail and the more little treats guests will expect. I certainly would expect more if I was paying more for a B& B, a hotel or self catering accommodation. If your B& B mainly serves guests who just need a bed for the night, a welcome basket may be less important than for a B& B that attracts guests staying for longer periods and who's hoping to create lots of repeat business.
You do need to consider your budget and your costs, but also think strategically about the long term [00:05:00] benefits of making your guests feel special. I think you need to balance the cost of providing a few extras now with the potential of turning those guests into repeat customers. A repeat customer is going to hopefully book with you directly and save you 15 percent on those online travel agency fees.
At my own B& B, As frequent listeners will know, I used to provide a whole lemon drizzle cake and homemade shortbread bread for each set of arriving guests. There was also fresh milk in the fridge, bottled and filtered tap water. But I did charge a lot for my B& B rooms, especially for the area we were in, and I relied on my repeat guests.
So that approach may be overkill for your business. Only you know your business and what's right for you. With the fresh milk and water, if you don't have a fridge, then it's a good idea to use milk bottle flasks. I didn't always have fridges. When I first started [00:06:00] off, I didn't have fridges and I used the little flasks and out of Eden have some great little flasks that have milk written on them and they're great for customers who don't like UHT milk.
Many of my guests left reviews saying they loved all the little extras and they often came back as a result of the extras and , the whole package really. And my repeat customers, eventually accounted for 70 percent of my bookings. I'm confident that after getting all the B& B basics right, the lemon drizzle cake played a big part in that repeat business.
If you are thinking of setting up a B& B I do have a little mini course, a little mini workshop which goes through the basics of setting up a B& B and what you really need to be thinking about and you can find that over at bnbacademy. co. uk just check out the menu bar at the top and you'll see I think it's something like mini, mini course.
So [00:07:00] what should you put in a B& B welcome basket? So what you include in that basket is, or the virtual basket, is going to depend on your time commitments, the types of guests you want to attract, your budget and your cost. A B& B in the countryside without eating places that guests can visit on foot may do better offering cake, for example, than a B& B in a town or city centre with lots of tea rooms and cafes.
The cake and the biscuits did amazingly well at my B& B and were invariably eaten, but I have heard people who are in the center of a city saying that the cake they put in the room very rarely gets eaten. That's probably because people have far more options in terms of things to eat and places they can go and visit walking from the B& B.
You might find guests prefer healthier options such as a fruit bowl in the room or snack packets of seeds and nuts. I think as many people get more health conscious these days that might appeal to your market [00:08:00] more, although there is something about going away and getting a nice treat.
If you're still stuck for ideas on what to offer, then check the reviews of Successful B& Bs on TripAdvisor or the OTAs and see if you can get some ideas about what their guests love about their visit. The clues are those things that the guests are always commenting on, always leaving reviews about.
In terms of sweet treats, I'm thinking in terms of cost, baking your own cakes with the right recipe is relatively cheap to do.
. What it will cost you is a bit of time and to do this you do need to find the right recipe and that's important as it's both a cost and a time saver.
If you don't have time to bait your own, or if it's not right for your market, don't worry Places like Out of Eden offer an excellent range of quality biscuits and cakes, or you can try offering some sweets and chocolates which is also a nice touch.
If you go along to Out of [00:09:00] Eden they have a great variety of chocolates and sweets that you can buy and biscuits that you can buy in bulk. The lemon drizzle cake recipe The reason it worked so well for me was it made three whole loaf cakes at a time, so I wasn't having to bake a cake, an individual cake for each set of guests, and it freezes beautifully, and it was an all in one recipe, so I chucked all the ingredients into my mixer, mixed it on high for two minutes, and it was ready to bake.
If you choose a recipe that takes a lot of different steps and only makes one cake. For example, Victoria sponge. That's only going to make one cake. It uses the same amount of ingredients as the lemon drizzle. You're also having to add in butter icing.
It's going to take much more time and effort to make. I guess you could just give the guests a couple of slices each. But I, I quite like the, the generosity, my guests like the generosity of finding a whole cake in the room. Another advantage of giving the guests a whole cake in the room [00:10:00] meant I wasn't having to constantly fill up the cake tins.
Though it wasn't that rare of an occurrence for guests to eat a whole lemon drizzle cake on their first evening here, which always left me with that dilemma of should I, or shouldn't I replace the cake, and of course, I always did.
You can go along to my blog and have a search for my lemon drizzle cake recipe and my shortbread recipe is also there. By the way, I've started making my shortbread flour. I use wholemeal spelt flour. Now, I am no way saying that shortbread is healthy or is a health food, but I do like to think that I'm making it a bit healthier by putting a bit of whole wheat flour and adding a bit of fiber into the recipe.
If you have guests with special dietary requirements, I used to find that they were really extra pleased if you made the effort to provide them with goodies that were suitable for their diets. , a lemon drizzle cake made from gluten free ingredients always took extra time and [00:11:00] expense, but it was worth it for the gloam reviews.
The same if you're making vegan cakes. There are lots of great recipes out there for vegan cakes these days, but it really did improve the chance of turning them into a repeat guest. Remember that those little extras and that tiny little bit of extra expense now could save you on some big fees later on with the OTAs.
I do have a blog post which is how to cater for guests with special dietary requirements. Again, head over to bnbacademy. co. uk for that. Let's talk now a bit more about non food goodies. Supplying your guests with toiletries is usually expected today, but offering them particularly nice toiletries and the right choice will give you bonus points.
One of my bugbears is conditioning shampoo. Extra points from me to any accommodation that provides separate shampoo and conditioner. I have written a blog post which is all about choosing the right toiletries for your B& B. You can go across the [00:12:00] website and find that blog post there
so I'm not going to talk any more about toiletries today. One thing I did that guests loved was to leave a postcard on the bed. And it was a postcard I made up from my own photos. I would create it in Canva and then upload it to a printing company, an online printing company such as Vistaprint.
What really made the postcard popular was it had a stamp on it, along with a note telling guests where the nearest postbox was. And it was very rare that the postcard wasn't taken and sent to their friends.
And of course the postcard had my B& B info on it, so the friend receiving it now knew all about my business, so that was a great referral. If you don't have your own postcards, you could always buy them from a local business and put a label on them with your business name and website.
I'd also suggest buying in some blank greeting cards that are fairly generic. So if you know your guests are staying for a special [00:13:00] occasion, a card from the host is usually appreciated, especially those with local views.
Whenever my guests arrive I would ask them what they were planning to do during their stay and I lost count of the people who replied with we haven't really got any plans what would you suggest. So I am a huge fan of providing itineraries for guests both in advance on your B& B blog or by email and leaving it in the room when they arrived.
Suggested itineraries save you time in repeating the same information to guests over and over, and they are a huge added value item for guests. You could buy a local guidebook or map and leave it in the room, or you could put your own itinerary together. Itinerary might be a suggestion for days out, or you could put your with several places to visit, somewhere nice to stop for lunch, including how far away it is, and the driving times. If you're catering to a specific market [00:14:00] such as dog owners, or those with different accessibility requirements, you could put together the perfect itinerary for them.
I saw a lovely idea recently from Claire and Dave at the Schoolhouse B& B at Chapel Lawn near me here in Shropshire. They put on their Instagram, that they created a twitchers basket. So they included some identification guide and binoculars and a little notebook for guests to be able to identify the birds that they see when they're staying with them. You could do the same thing , with flowers. If you've got a wildflower meadow or butterflies, anything that sort of fits in with your local area. Whilst a lot of B& Bs were swapped over to welcome information folders online, and I think they're really great for guests to plan with prior to their stay.
I once had some guests say to me after they'd read the information on my website, we'd only plan to stay for two nights, but we'd like to extend our stay to four nights, because we didn't realise there was so much to do in the area. [00:15:00] I do think it's nice to find a hard copy guest information folder in the room.
I love going to a . B& B or a hotel and looking through the information folder rather than just looking at the information online. And if you're after some nice information folders and ones that you can put your own information in, Out of Eden have a great selection at outofeden. co. uk.
Another thing that you can do for guests is consider putting a bucket list of local things together. Again on your website or in your welcome email or print it off in the room. Challenges such as ticking everything off on a bucket list are hugely popular in the marketing world right now and they are a great way of helping guests explore the area.
I'm sure I'm not alone in loving my iSpy books when I was a kid. And you could also encourage your guests to share photos or videos of the bucket list items or activities on social media.
Get them to [00:16:00] tag you in or use a hashtag that you've specifically created. The good thing about a bucket list is a more competitive guest may want to their bucket list. Make a return visit to finish ticking items off. As I said, I often had guests say to me, we didn't realise there was so much to do, we'll be coming back.
You could do nature bucket lists, seasonal bucket lists, or picking up on Claire and Dave's idea of a twitchers pack, you could do a bird bucket list. In the blog post that accompanies this podcast, I've included a Canva template for a bucket list with some examples to give you some ideas. So you can use that template there.
Another hugely popular item at my B& B was what I called, or what is called, I didn't name it, I got it from somebody else, the forget me not box. A B& B bedroom forget me not box typically includes essential items such as The guests might have forgotten to pack. So, you know, if you head over to the Out of Eden amenities page, you can [00:17:00] see all the sorts of things that people love to see in the room.
So, common items you might include are your toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, deodorant, sanitary products, shower cap. There's a whole list on the blog post. Now one question that arises quite often is should you charge for items in your forget me not box?
A bit later I'm going to talk about whether you should charge for items , in your room. at all. Personally, I find it off putting to enter a hotel room and see everything with a price tag. We did set a B& B once and it was quite expensive for the time.
It was 160 quid a night and we got in and everything in the room, the water, the crisps, the cake, all had a little price tag on it and I just sort of felt I actually I would rather have paid 10 pound extra and for everything to be included. However, it can be frustrating when guests take all the items from the forget me not box, which did happen to me a couple of times.
You know, I had to go in and obviously the box had just been upended into [00:18:00] their suitcase. To prevent this, you could include a note saying something like, we have provided this box for your convenience with essential items you may have forgotten to bring. If you use any items, please leave a note so we can replace them for the next guest.
Or you could charge. We have provided this forget me not box for your convenience with essential items you may have forgotten to bring. If you use any items, please consider leaving a donation in our charity box. I think these gentle prompts encourage guests to be considerate and hopefully deter them from taking everything.
I think it's quite important to review your welcome basket regularly. You may have lots of ideas of what to put in it, but some items may , be of more value to guests than others. I used to put local crisps and a small bottle of wine in the room alongside the fresh milk, water, cake and shortbread and I used to put some local chocolates as well.
Just remember about the wine, if you're giving guests alcohol, even if you provide it free, you will [00:19:00] need an alcohol licence. blog posts all about that on the website. But I found the crystal and wine were never mentioned by guests in reviews and guests would often usually actually bring their own bottle of wine anyway.
I supplied glasses and a corkscrew. So I decided to stop off in the Crispin Wine and no one ever mentioned to me that they missed them. And that did save me quite a bit per guest per stay without affecting the guest experience. So make sure you're keeping a close eye on what your guests are saying to you and check your reviews carefully and consider removing items if they're not mentioned very often.
You could always keep a supply of them, just in case guests do ask. Another thing you might consider doing is offering different goodies to different tiers of guests. Now, I'm a huge fan of email marketing, but it can be difficult to get people to sign up, so it's a good idea to offer them an incentive.
to join your list. [00:20:00] You could create some type of club for email subscribers, offering them little extras that other guests don't get. Sorts of things I'm thinking about, some virtual and some actual things, so early check in, late check out, free platter if you offer them, free drink if you're licensed, maybe a free copy of a local map, guidebook or a calendar.
You might put extra goodies in the welcome basket. You might also consider doing something similar for your repeat guests, even if they're not on your email list, but do encourage them to join.
One of our favourite small hotels always used to leave a couple of chocolates or a jar of local honey with a welcome back card. Nothing big, but we always , appreciated the recognition that we were repeat guests.
So I talked about charging a bit before, and I said another one of my bug bears is paying a lot of money for a hotel room than finding I have to pay another couple of quid for the mineral water in the room. I would say I'd much rather a place [00:21:00] charge an extra 10 pounds a night and offered us all the goodies for free.
But it's about getting that balance of creating extra income from an upsell with creating a, a special experience for guests and potentially turn them into repeat business. Probably a better way of doing this is to give your guests something for free than also offering them something for sale. For example, I offered the lemon drizzle cake and shortbread for free but if guests wanted a different cake, such as that Victoria sponge, which was, you know, it was more expensive for me to make, took me longer, they could order that and pay for it as an extra and I had it as an extra on my online booking form.
You could offer them free cake and biscuits and then give them the option of buying additional cakes, biscuits to take home with them. You could give them a free postcard or greeting card and then offer additional cards or calendars by the same photographer or if you make your own calendars up for sale.
You could provide free [00:22:00] toiletries whilst they stay but then when they're ready to leave you could have toiletries for sale in the reception area.
Guests are quite often looking for gifts to take back for dog sitters or house sitters or just gifts for friends from their holiday. So just to wrap up the blog post, providing thoughtful extras in your B& B such as items you might put in a welcome basket and other items such as toiletries and postcards Can significantly enhance your guest experience and encourage repeat business.
You need to pay attention to what your guests comment on and consider offering different goodies to different tiers of guests and regularly review and adjust your offerings based on guests feedback to ensure you're providing value for money without incurring unnecessary costs. Remember small touches like homemade cakes, Personalised postcards and quality toiletries can make a big difference.
And whether you decide to charge for extras or [00:23:00] include them in your room rate, focus on creating a special experience that sets your B& B apart. So that's the end of the podcast. For many more blogs and also a growing library of podcast episodes, head over to my website, bnbacademy. co. uk. And as I said, there, you can find my main online BNB course, how to set up, run and market a BNB, and also the mini workshop, which is the first step.
That's of running a bed and breakfast, which comes with a few extra bonuses. And that is for those of you who aren't sure whether running a B& B is for you yet or not, or you're still at those very early stages. If you are listening to my podcast on Spotify or Apple, please do go ahead and hit the subscribe button.
That really does help me. The more people that subscribe, the more people get to hear my podcast and the more content I can produce. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your week or weekend whenever you're listening and bye for now.
