Category Archives: BRANDING

Towels

May 13, 2019BNB, BRANDING, DECOR, HOSTING, PALO ALTO, PaloAltoBNBBNB, Checkout, DESIGN, PALO ALTO, PaloAltoBNBchallenyee

OUR LOVELY TOWELS

We provide these wonderful towels bought from Macy’s. We carefully selected them from scores of choices from a variety of retail outlets and the colors and quality match our interior decor. We check, wash, and dry each towel before carefully folding them to store for our next guests.

One of our rules is we ask our guests not to use them to clean the floors with or leave them on the ground.

This leads me to ask my audience, how do you treat your towels at home compared to how you treat the average hotel towel?

How much would you use your towels at home to soak up liquids, fluids or matter that is anything other than wiping your cleaned-rinsed-off-body dry?

For the most part, I believe our guests are very good at handling our towels. We provide a special towel just for the floor for wet feet. We provide a common hanging hand towel for our guests who have some guests over. We provide a hand towel and as you can see, a face towel, personal hand towel and body towel.

On top of that we provide a clothes basket to put stuff for wash and a washer dryer with hypoallergenic detergent powder.

Come on. Let’s see…

Let me know what you would use a hotel towel for that you would never use your wedding gift towels or your last bargain from COSTCO or BED, BATH and BEYOND? You know what I’m talking about… those white towels ones that can be bleached with chlorine to kingdom come after they are used for janitorial work or the latest physiology experiment.

Now that you’ve got that out of your system, please don’t stay at a BNB and exercise any of those little bad habits. We are like a hotel in good ways, but you’re still guest in someone’s home.

Please like, share, comment, follow my blog or contact me if you have any questions, or if you’ve got some nice tips.

CKY

9 Tips for Facing an Unoccupied Month

February 10, 2019BNB, BRANDING, HOSTING, MANAGEMENT, PaloAltoBNB, TRAVELBNB, HOSTING, PaloAltoBNB, REAL ESTATE, TRAVELchallenyee

Have you ever looked at your BNB schedule and see that after your current guest, you have no one booked for the next 30 days. It does give you a sinking feeling, especially if you’re relying on the income to survive.

Does your reservation calendar look like an empty beach? (photo of Drake’s Bay, CA north of San Francisco – by Challen)

There’s a number of things you can either try or consider since running a BNB you can’t really go out and start rounding up guests passing by with a lasso.

Here’s 9 tips, not in any particular order:

(1) Update your website or listing with new photos, better photos, or a catchy write up or title. So many listing around her promote Stanford, and if the listing actually resides in or near Stanford, that’s a good boost.

(2) Try lowering your prices under the next relevant search level. For example, lower them under the next $50 mark (i.e $250, $300, $350, $400, $450, etc). Searchers may be setting upper price limits to narrow down their choices.

(3)Take some faith in how guests tend to book your listing. Maybe you’ve had a lot of guests book within a week instead of two months ahead (like we’d all like to see that).

(4) Try “Instant Booking” (Airbnb). What this allows is for greater exposure to your listing as your will show up for both “Instant” and non-instant, instead of just non-instant listings.

(5) Try removing the extra guest costs if you are using them just to make the cost calculation easier.

(6) Update you listing to become more friendly to a guest. For example, use a keypad or other self-service mode of entry. This way a business man or woman doesn’t need to call you at 2 am to get a key or wonder if the key is actually in the hideaway place that you wrote.

(7) Offer something special (like food or other service), make the stay more attractive.

(8) Keep the darn place clean inside and in good order outside. It doesn’t matter of the guest is staying at a mansion or Motel 6,they want a clean place to stay. No one likes to stay in a beater. Take very positive steps and make amends in the listing and comments to make your listing a non-beater if yov’ve been reviewed as being on the dirty, trashy, or nasty side.

(9) Treat each guest and inquiry with respect and respond as soon as possible (if not immediately). Remember, you are in the hospitality business, not just a landlord or property manager. In fact, you may be the only ambassador of your town or neighborhood that the guest from another country may ever know.

Please like, share, comment, follow my blog or contact me if you have any questions, or if you’ve got some nice tips.

CKY

Guest Tips: Initial Communication

January 20, 2019BNB, BOOKING, BRANDING, BUSINESS, PALO ALTO, PaloAltoBNB, TRAVELBNB, BOOKING, BUSINESS, PALO ALTO, PaloAltoBNB, Screening, TRAVELchallenyee

When you try booking a BNB, especially for the first time when you have no review history, It’s important to keep an eye on your messenger to make sure the host does not have a question for you.

THE REQUEST

I had a recent request from a businessman out of the Midwest (exact city to keep it confidential) for a one-night stay, and in his brief introduction he asked to stay two hours after the standard checkout time.

Well, that was worth a quick response from yours truly as I have to prepare for the worst case.

Now, I don’t have problems with people needing to check out later, though not too late, because we do have a tight cleaning schedule and we take that very seriously.

Especially since we allow same day reservations, I don’t want to push cleaning out too late and then interfere with an oncoming guest. Plus our cleaning crew, we don’t want to have to play with their time either as we all have children to pickup from school, so on and so forth.

Armed with all these concerns, I send a reply to see how we can work out the issue. I send it within 10 minutes and get no response.

I send a follow up message 3 minutes later, no response.

Well, well, well…. That puts the host into a bind.

The request automatically blocks my schedule with a guest who I do not know if they are responsive or flexible enough to coordinate cleaning with his need to stay two extra hours.

If I accept, I may not have enough time to not interfere with the next guest or have enough time or people to hang out at the place to clean it.

If I decline, I could lose out in income and kill someone’s accommodation plans.

I compromised in the end, I waited 18 hours for a response, and on a Sunday morning, I declined it and offered a detailed explanation and an invitation to rebook if they wanted but to acknowledge we need to work out an issue first..

The rational was the guest was not responsive and I’d rather let someone else book who was a more reliable even though the booking was within a week’s time. It was one of those “peace of mind” versus money decisions I wrote about in a previous blog post. I could easily lose a day’s income.

Fortunately, this particular person, given half a chance, jumped gracefully through the hoop. He finally read my messages after the Decline and was apologetic, flexible and understanding, plus good for a few back-and-forth iterations to get a handle on our respective needs.

While it was not my ideal track to a smooth booking, it turns out this person proved himself to be a really good person to work things out with.

Please like, share, comment, follow my blog or contact me if you have any questions

CKY

Why Here? Why Now?

December 19, 2018BNB, BRANDING, Facebook, SOCIAL MEDIABlogging, BNB, BRANDING, Facebook, SOCIAL MEDIAchallenyee

Building Recession Immunity in the Age of Social Media

I’ve used social media for a few years now, since the Summer of 2014 when my old friend and fellow submariner Jeff Marcey told me Facebook was the way to go to promote my business.

Before, like many people who resist change, I had a very prejudiced attitude against social media and platforms like Facebook but knowing my friend is usually ahead of the curve with his ideas, I decided to take a first step.

All of those years I spent in relative isolation in my former corporate engineering space, I was hard at work though not involved with the world of the social media, those apps that were altering the minds of the new generation of socialites and professionals.

Staying in isolation from the influence of the internet doesn’t allow exposure to the advantages offered by smart phones and the apps that power them – and, yeh, it doesn’t help being turned off by the sight of so many people postured with zombie-like face to Iphone, an idiosyncrasy on a pandemic scale, evidence that we have not reached any kind of zenith in human development.

Nevertheless, with the crash and burn of the smoking remnants of my corporate career in 2017, there has perhaps been no better circumstance to entertain and develop new ideas like running a BNB! (This option wasn’t obvious, only after not succeeding at other efforts to build a survivable income).

Now, from my experience, there is no better platform than Facebook that I know of that is more useful for organizing reunions. For me, It’s been a labor of manly camaraderie without any kind of financial intentions. We’ve already managed to help gather many shipmates from the submarine I served on (USS Bremerton SSN 698) of which many have attended a couple of successful gatherings.