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- Gwen's Lodge, Cooper Landing, AK

"Consumers pick B&B' or Country Inns for the romantic feelings they inspire, said Pamela Lanier author of, The Complete Guide of Bed and Breakfasts Inns International and founder of Lanier BB."

- CBS Market Watch

Cookbooks

Cinnamon Mornings and Chocolate Dreams

Whether you're hosting a formal get-together or need a quick brunch idea, this book will spark your imagination and your appetite.

The Numbers Game

By Dick Matthews
Published by on July 23, 2009
Our Beginnings
When the former owners turned the inn over to us in July of 2003, they left a legacy of experience. In the 11 years they’d owned the house they’d transformed it from an unoccupied and empty shell into a successful bed and breakfast. Starting with a structure that was on the verge of being lost, they’d renovated it with skill and a careful regard for accuracy, restoring to it much of the grace of its 150 years of history. Opening initially with just two guest rooms, they expanded as they were able, furnishing, decorating, and building the business as they went.
By the time we took over, the inn was a going concern. It had a track record, a financial history, and a visible presence in the bed and breakfast industry. It also had a respectable occupancy rate. In a business where a 4 to 5-room inn’s occupancy comes in at around 32 percent, the Hummingbird’s averaged 42. (The occupancy rate, expressed as a percentage, is the number of rooms actually rented against the total available.) Now it was our turn to see what we could do.
We had a lot to absorb. We both had run businesses before—I had owned a weekly newspaper and Pam had managed several doctor’s offices—but owning an inn, as we soon learned, was a different enterprise altogether. To start with, it had two facets. The first revolved around the dream many people bring to inn keeping with them: playing host to guests, preparing special meals, decorating and furnishing rooms in unique styles, all combining to provide a memorable experience for travelers. The other facet was more pedestrian, but important to master if we expected to stay in business: paying the mortgage and utilities, balancing expenses against income, keeping the property in good repair, and marketing the inn so paying guests would come through its doors. In theory, we understood we couldn’t have the dream without also having the wherewithal to sustain it, but applying the theory to the daily functioning of the Hummingbird involved assimilating knowledge and skills we didn’t possess when we came in.
The Hummingbird has another side as well, for while it is our livelihood, it is also our home. As many B&B owners do, we live on the premises. But unlike some who find their way to inn keeping, we didn’t come to it as bed and breakfast hobbyists. We hadn’t simply converted a couple of rooms in our family home to take in guests, thereby supplementing an income one of us provided through an outside job, and neither of us had a comfortable retirement income to fall back on. The Hummingbird Inn was all we had and it needed to sustain both itself and us. If we failed to generate enough income to pay the mortgage, we’d not only lose our business, we’d also lose our home.

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