Renovation project - How do you advertise rooms when you're selling a B&B?

Renovation project - How do you advertise rooms when you're selling a B&B?

We have been back from Christmas for a while now and have been surprised at how many enquiries we have had for the B&B, we had not planned on re opening until Easter, but it does seem silly to be turning away business.

We decide to reopen on the 1^st Feb and we soon have bookings coming in, we never in a million years expected the B&B to be so busy, our biggest problem now is how far in advance do we advertise?

Properties in france can be on the market for a long time, we think we have priced it to sell, but it's been a few days and we haven’t had any one walk through the door waving their Euros at us (not that I'm impatient at all)

So we decide to advertise 2 months at a time, because even if we do get a sale it's unlikely to go through in less than 2 months, plus if somebody wants to buy it as a going concern we don’t want it to look like there are no customers.

Life seems to be full of dilemmas at the moment and every new move just opens up further dilemmas. This is probably one of the biggest problems when selling a B&B, how do you advertise?

Do we go back on all the big sites or do we just stick with our own website?

It is also time to decide whether we want to go onto the local tourist board, last year we were getting almost daily phone calls from them, even when we said we were full.

The last thing I want is for somebody to buy the property as a family home and get people calling in or ringing for a room!

I decide to re advertise on the big booking sites, as it is easy to advertise for only a set amount of time, the problem with having limited availability is that you are not as high up the rankings as you should be, we are number one on Booking dot com, but with limited availability we are not on the top slot, but we decide this is a small cost

I also reopen the website so that we can have direct bookings, after all these are the ones with no commission and are much more personal.

I decide not to bother with the local tourist board, and if we haven't sold by Summer then we can pay too be included then.

It does not take long before we receive our first bookings and hey ho, life is on the move again, our break is well and truly over! well until the middle of Feb, when we have friends over to visit, afterall it's not going to be that busy during the cold winter months is it????

We also have a surprise with the snow, it is very rare that we get snow or frost here, but when we do, it is so beautiful, it is almost a shame it only lasts for a couple of days