BED AND BREAKFAST MANAGEMENT

Learn to Operate a Guesthouse or B and B

• Convert one or more bedrooms in your home into guest rooms and start your own B & B. This can be a viable, rewarding way to supplement income.
• Create new accommodation on any property; perhaps converting an old building, or building something new.
• You may choose to buy a new property with ideas of renovating and establishing a guesthouse.

Whatever your story; this course can be a great starting point for you to plan and prepare for a whole new business and life adventure.

Lesson Structure

There are 7 lessons in this course:

1. IIntroduction to Management & Marketing
   • Introduction
   • Basic Principles of Management
   • Four Main Steps in Management
   • Planning, Leading, Organising, Controlling
   • Economic View of Management
   • Behavioural View of Management
   • The Stakeholder Theory
   • Understanding policies
   • Marketing -Feasibility Research
   • Advertising Steps to Follow
   • Purpose of Advertising
   • Advertising through media, by personal contact
2. Facilities and Decor
   • General layout - Reception, Dining area, Food Production
   • Equipment - essential equipment, selection criteria
   • Equipment Inventory
   • Reception, Storage (Dry store, Vegetable store, Refrigeration, Storage temperatures_
   • Food Preparation - vegetables, salad, meat, fish, pastry
   • Parking
   • Telephones, Communication and Technology - utilities
   • Cleaning - outside the building, reception, lounge, bedrooms, bathrooms, corridors, kitchens
3. Customer Service
   • Personnel and service.
   • Division of Duties
   • Importance of Customer service.
   • Customer Service Skills - waiting, carrying things,
   • Interpersonal Skills - addressing customers, records
   • Staff Recruitment, Interviewing, Training and Induction.
   • Controlling Staff -leadership, Giving Orders / orders not correctly carried out
   • Procedures for dealing with orders not carried out correctly.
   • Bedroom service.
4. Equipment
   • Principles of design.
   • Service Facilities
   • Cleaning/ Cleansing
   • Waste Disposal
   • Toilet & Bathroom Facilities
   • Safety Risk analysis.
   • Safety audit.
   • Using audit forms and checklists.
   • Signs for communication danger
   • Materials control
   • Maintenance control - useful checks
5. Supplying Meals
   • Breakfast timings.
   • What to serve (continental or full cooked breakfast).
   • Coffee - blends, grinding, troubleshooting, coffee variations
   • Teas- specialty teas, herbal teas, storing, brewing
   • Presentation of food & beverage
   • Dealing with special requirements -breakfast in room, children, vegans / vegetarians, etc
   • Serving other meals and snacks.
   • Organising "experience" meals
   • Dealing with customer complaints
6. Food Purchasing
   • Effective purchasing
   • Planning ahead
   • Role of the purchaser
   • Supplier Selection
   • Bulk buying
   • Other Purchasing Approaches - contract, day to day, commissary, tenders, etc
   • Know about following regulations (know the legalities and alcohol licensing).
7. Records and Financial Management
   • Management of guesthouse records.
   • Reservations procedures.
   • Cancellation procedure.
   • The control of accounts.
   • Methods of payment.
   • Safe deposits.
   • Liabilities.
   • Productivity.
   • Financial records management.
   • Insurance.
   • Taxation.
   • Financial control.

What is Needed for Success?

Operating a successful b and b or guesthouse; requires three things:

1. An appropriate accommodation facility
2. A quality of service that satisfies customers
3. Connecting with customers and getting them to decide to use your service.

Having the right property and providing a good service will be to no avail if you remain unknown, or if you cannot convince customers to choose your accommodation instead of other options on offer to them.

Most businesses may well think – 
  "We want customers", and 
  "We want sales"
Many however fail to really determine who their potential customers are; then market their business properly to that predetermined target market.

Getting any customer can be difficult, and getting the best type of customer can be even harder -at least at first.
In any business, there will be customers who take up a lot of time, asking questions, going over and over things, using up a lot of your time. And then in the end, they do not buy anything.   You have wasted your time? There will of course be those customers who you have spent a lot of time with, who do go onto buy the goods or the products, but there are those who will not. You may have wasted your time. That customer may never actually buy anything from you. But if you offered them a polite service and were informative, in the future, they may come back to you and buy – maybe not that product or service – but perhaps something else. Or they may never buy something from you, but they might tell other people how good you were, what excellent service you offered. So offering a good service, even though it does not result in a sale can still reap rewards.

How much help you offer a person is again something for a business person’s individual choice. If a customer keeps coming back over and over and over and never buys anything, there will perhaps come a point where you have to say, “I can’t do anymore, I’ve told them everything”. At that point, you may wish to give them a standard response or suggest something like –

“Thank you for your enquiry. I know over the last few weeks/days/years, we have gone over quite a lot of detail in the products/services we offer. I can see you are having difficulties in making a choice. There is a lot of information to take in, so perhaps you could spend some time going over the information to see what is most suitable for you. If there is something specific I can help you with to make that choice, then please ask.” Then hope they do come back with the specific question that is stopping them buying. Or perhaps they just go away. Sometimes, that can be the best option.

This course will help you to both make decisions about the physical facilities as well as the services you provide. It will also help you to refine your approach to managing and marketing a B and B.