From Wikipedia:
“Bed and breakfast (typically shortened to B&B or BnB) is a small lodging establishment that offers overnight accommodation and breakfast. Bed and breakfasts are often private family homes and typically have between four and eleven rooms, with six being the average. In addition, a B&B usually has the hosts living in the house.” It is generally accepted that B&B’s began and flourished in the UK in the 1940’s, particularly prominent post WW2.
Lately, there have been a ton of commercials across all forms of media stating that a vacation rental is a much better experience than a B&B. That’s fine, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, until they compare apples to oranges, as the saying goes. I feel like there’s a little room for debate and a huge amount of room for understanding the two as being entirely different situations so you are about to hear my take on it…
When I started my Lodge, “Air BnB” didn’t exist, I don’t think “VRBO” did either… they both would emerge and become the gigantic trademark entities of the hospitality industry that they are today while I was busy running a real B&B Lodge. Back in those days (circa 2002) “B&B” was “THE THING” worldwide, the trendy way to discover real people and real life in the places you were traveling to, and to have accommodation that was way more like peaceful & comfy home than noisy & antiseptic hotel.
As Wikipedia aims to point out, the whole point of staying in a B&B (as opposed to a hotel, or a vacation rental for that matter) is to stay in someone else’s home where you are hosted by the owners and treated to a breakfast prepared by the owners/residents/hosts. In my actual decades of experience visiting B&B’s, and in my 14 years owning and hosting one I can add that the breakfast is usually quite sensational; home-made with fresh & fab ingredients, and super delicious. In addition, the accommodations are almost always fantastic, with beautiful artworks, collectibles and furnishings for you to enjoy and help make your stay extra-comfortable (things you don’t get in a hotel because they would be stolen without regular monitoring). The recent barrage of commercials seems to suggest that the B&B experience should be avoided if you’re going to have a happy and successful vacation and I am somewhere between perplexed and totally pissed off with the producers of this toxic (and completely uninformed) bilge.
In 2007 Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were broke and looking to raise money to make their rent in San Francisco. They decided to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to attendees of a conference because all the hotels were booked. They called their service “Air Bed and Breakfast.” In a few years, this small experiment would create the hotel industry disruptor Airbnb (1).
Do you see how the disconnect immediately happened? Air BnB took claim to the B&B reference/name without the HUGE majority of the actual historic qualifications. They didn’t offer breakfast, in fact, they didn’t even offer a real bed (laughing out loud!), they just offered a blow-up pad to crash on, in their home, without even their own, private place to bathe. Through absolute marketing genius (or luck), these two happened into giant success by creating a totally false connection to what was a completely different tourism trend of more than half a century. Their success would forever (or at least until now and probably for a long time to come) tarnish the image of that previously embraced hospitality service. I commend their success but condone the damage they have done to the image of the once beloved Bed and Breakfast experience.
More and more, as I see and hear those ads that are designed to insult, devalue and discredit B&B’s, I have felt very compelled to do a bit of fact-sharing and urge all of you to understand the galactically-different meanings of B&B and AirBnB. They make look very similar but they are, actually, not similar at all. Please keep this in mind as you book either, know what you want and get what you want but from here on, at least YOU will know the difference.
For those interested in even further clarification, my next several blog posts will be examples from my lodge (and others’) that will show you exactly what you can and can’t expect from a B&B vs. an AirB&B, with pictures! Maybe we can straighten out the misconceptions of those insulting and somewhat defamatory ads. Possibly you’ll enjoy a new appreciation for all the many B&B’s out there that still offer a wonderful experience for travelers who want a little more from their vacations than impersonal surroundings, pre-fab breakfast foods in cellophane and absentee property managers that don’t see customer service as a priority. I hope you will stay tuned; this is going to be a fun learning experience. 😉
Thank you for stopping in to see what I’m up to! I’m always happy to hear your feedback and hope that you have enjoyed these moments with me and my inside voice.
1. Leigh Gallagher, “The AirBnB Story”
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