The House at Royal Oak (27 page)

Reasons why you should
not
start or acquire a bed-and-breakfast are the other face of the very reasons for going forward.

Leading a work life closer to home means that the stresses can spill over into your private life, with work becoming the only, and seemingly inescapable, reality. Burnout is high. Everyone in the business for any length of time emphasizes the importance of taking breaks away from the workplace, especially if you live at the bed-and-breakfast, which is a requirement in some areas for licensing.

Among those who open a bed-and-breakfast, approximately a third leave by five years, another third are out of business by ten years, and a committed third last for twenty years or longer. The average length of bed-and-breakfast ownership is seven years.

Yes, your house as a bed-and-breakfast will bring in money, but the high cost of real estate means it is harder than in the past to make a go of a bed-and-breakfast. It used to be estimated that you needed five rooms to “make money,” including living expenses and paying a mortgage. Now the figure more often given is ten rooms, depending on the surroundings, competition, and overall economy of the region where your B&B is situated.

Every day hundreds of bed-and-breakfasts are offered for sale, typically ranging from about $300,000 for a small one in northern Michigan to a bed-and-breakfast with seven rooms in prime Vermont tourist territory for $1.3 million. In New York the range is even greater and you can find wide choice all over the country from $800,000 to $2 million.

The average price charged per night for a room at a bed-and-breakfast in this country is $144, according to the Professional Association of Innkeepers International. With many amenities and a highly desirable resort setting, rooms at a smaller number of establishments, as for example on Martha's Vineyard or the California coast, can run as much as $300 to $400 a night. Even at that level, the arithmetic is sobering. How many nights a year will you have to rent the rooms to pay your bills?

Yes, you are the boss but only up to a point. It can be a challenge to meet guests' expectations and highly demanding guests can push you to your limit if you let them. There is technique and art to determining when to say yes or no, and how to say it. When a family of five shows up on your doorstep in a late-night storm, will you squeeze three extra guests into a room they reserved for two? Will you serve coffee at four-thirty in the morning for a guest who likes coffee then? Will you grant a partial refund to someone who passes up breakfast? No, we learned to answer this question. Breakfast is a courtesy that accompanies the room.

Over time any chink in your policies will be detected and challenged. Long after we thought we had heard it all came a
request to serve breakfast at midnight and another guest asking if his son, who was being married nearby, could come over with the groomsmen to dress for the wedding. All right, we said, never guessing that they would take over the parlor and front porch, to the great amusement of the neighbors. At the post office the next day, Hugo had some explaining to do. “We saw your front porch filled up with half-naked men,” Francine commented.
“What
was going on?”

A colleague in Arizona had a guest who came to breakfast dressed in a jaw-dropping nightgown, one problem we haven't encountered yet. When a guest did ask not long ago if she could come down to breakfast in her pajamas, I agreed because there were no other guests staying that night. In the morning she turned up in heavy flannel pajamas decorated with teddy bears, more presentable than some in their street clothes.

Many will appreciate your finest; a few won't. Some will request breakfast and leave it untouched. Some will have dietary restrictions, which is fine if you're told in advance, impossibly rude if you're informed as you are serving. People with restrictions generally know that asking in advance for a special meal helps ensure that they will get it. Those few guests who might come your way with a political agenda about food will try your patience.

Your antique beds may be authentic beauties, but they won't satisfy some guests' standards for size. “Do you mean an old-fashioned double bed like our grandparents slept in?” one
caller asked. Almost everyone who books a room inquires about the bed. Some of those who require a king bed will settle for a queen and those who prefer a queen will settle for an old-fashioned double, but in our experience, the king people will never accept a double. Personal taste might have to bend to guest comfort if you want happy guests, or guests at all.

. . . except when they are irascible or impossibly demanding. Then you are stuck counting the hours until they check out. When you open your doors to the public, you open the doors to many kinds of people.

Yes, but there are things you don't want to learn and will anyway. That nice couple who stayed last weekend? They tried to flush a box of Swiss chocolates down the toilet.

Most people go into the bed-and-breakfast business for the lifestyle and the economics and most leave it for the same reasons. Here are some points to keep in mind:

1. Expenses and Income. Estimate your expenses and the income to be generated by the bed-and-breakfast realistically to be sure you can cover your costs. These might include a
mortgage and living costs, such as health insurance and savings for retirement, items that tend to be overlooked in a casual assessment. Couples who go into the bed-and-breakfast business commonly keep one person employed elsewhere to ensure a steady income flow, at least initially.

2. “Room Nights.” A key factor in the income equation is how many nights you can expect to book your rooms year-round, not just in high season. This is based on the desirability of your place and the surroundings, as well as on how other similar establishments are faring in the vicinity of your bed-and-breakfast. Bear in mind that bed-and-breakfasts average a 40 percent occupancy rate.

3. Room Value. The related question of what you can charge for your rooms and services requires careful evaluation. Room rates typically vary from under $100 a night to $200 and up. Just because you think your inn is exquisitely charming and ought to be expensive, the competition might be intense or the overall economy of the area may price you out of the market. Research is necessary to set prices.

4. Marketing and Promotion. How effectively you will be able to promote your business may be difficult to assess at the outset. It requires skill and can be the source of expensive mistakes. If you previously ran a small business, or a large one, that experience will come in very handy.

5. Your Disposition and Skills. Are you flexible, do you have a calm disposition, and are you willing to work hard at the
variety of jobs, some of them tedious and repetitive, that will need doing? If it will be a larger bed-and-breakfast, are you an effective manager of staff, skillful with budgets, accounting practices, and basic business strategies?

6. Personal Goals. Understand what you hope to gain personally from the experience. That is, determine your objective. Consider these: companionship, with a room or two booked now and then to bring people into the house; a hobby, meaning you aren't planning to support yourself on the income; or a moneymaking venture. Be candid.

7. Wise First Steps. Attend one of the seminars offered to aspiring innkeepers, such as those sponsored by the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (
www.paii.org
). This organization welcomes innkeepers-to-be as well as owners and managers of bed-and-breakfasts and country inns, and the association publishes an informative newsletter,
Innkeeping.
An exhaustive, nuts-and-bolts guidebook,
So—You Want to Be An Innkeeper,
discusses every aspect of the business and problems of innkeeping, from legal structures to risk management to market trends to equipping a “luxury” bathroom.

We took none of those wise steps. Had we attended a workshop or read that guidebook, I am sure we never would have opened a bed-and-breakfast, so daunting can the details seem in the aggregate, and we would have missed a great run. What we did was to visit a lot of bed-and-breakfasts and if you, like us, see fit to proceed mainly on exuberance with skills carried over from other businesses, and are game to learn from your mistakes, I suggest this at the very least.

Presumably, you are already familiar with, and enjoy, bed-and-breakfasts as a visitor, but try staying at a variety of establishments as you consider them now from an owner's perspective. The view is very different. Running a good bed-and-breakfast takes a certain frame of mind: You have to want to make people feel happy, comfortable, and welcomed at your place. As a guest you can sense this from the minute you arrive.

Prologue

Barth, John. “A Floating Aria,”
Talking Tidewater: Writers on the Chesapeake,
edited by Richard Harwood. Chestertown, MD: Literary House Press, Washington College, 1996, 2003.

Emery, Theo. “After Steps to Desegregate, Plaintiffs Drop Tennessee Suit.”
New York Times,
September 12, 2006.
www.nyt.com
.

Chapter 1 A Curious Ballast

Marcus Aurelius,
Selections from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
translation and introduction by Benjamin E. Smith. New York: Century Company, 1899.

Chapter 2 Royal Oak

Chapelle, Suzanne Ellery, and Glenn O. Phillips.
African American Leaders of Maryland: A Portrait Gallery.
Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2004.

Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
From a Lighthouse Window: Recipes and Recollections from the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.
St. Michaels, MD: Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, 1989.

Commager, Henry Steele, ed.
The Blue and the Gray: The Story of the Civil War as Told by Participants,
vol. 1. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1950. Hallman, E.C.
The Garden of Methodism.
Peninsula Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, n.p., n.d.

Leonard, R. Bernice.
Twig and Turf,
vol. 3,
The Royal Oak.
St. Michaels, MD: privately printed, 1985.

Mariners' Museum, “Waters of Despair, Waters of Hope: African Americans on the Chesapeake,” exhibition at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, St. Michaels, MD, on loan from the Mariners' Museum, Newport News, VA, spring 2007.

Preston, Dickson J.
Talbot County: A History.
Centreville, MD: Tidewater Publishers, 1983.

Public Broadcasting Service. “Africans in America: Frederick Douglass.” June 28, 2007.
www.pbs.org
.

Shannahan, J.H.K.
Tales of Old Maryland: History and Romance on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Baltimore: Meyer and Thalheimer, 1907.

Chapter 6 The Bay

Baker, William C. “Averting a Chesapeake Disaster.”
Washington Post
(November 2, 2008): B8.

Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “Susquehanna River Named America's Most Endangered River for 2005.” April 20, 2005.
www.cbf.org
.

Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. “At Play on the Bay,” a guide to the exhibit. St. Michaels, MD: Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, n.d.

Chesapeake Bay Program Office. “American Oyster.” April 20, 2005.
www.chesapeakebay.net
.

Fahrenthold, David A. “Oyster Project Consumed with Problems: Predators Eat Test Shellfish.”
Washington Post
(August 25, 2004): B2.

____________. “Pollution Rising in Tributaries of Bay, Data Show.”
Washington Post
(December 5, 2007): B2.

____________. “To Some Chesapeake Crabbers, a $50 Document Is Priceless.”

Washington Post
(August 24, 2009): A6.

Harp, David, and Horton, Tom.
Waters Way: Life Along the Chesapeake.
n.p. Elliott and Clark, 1992.

Horton, Tom, and Harp, David. “Living on the Edge—Man, Nature and the Chesapeake Bay,” Lecture at the Avalon Theater, Easton, MD,

January 9, 2008.

Trade Environment Database (TED) Case Studies. “The Blue Crab: A Declining Resource.” April 20, 2005.
www.american.edu/projects
. Warner, William W.
Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976.

Chapter 7 Family, Family

Eron, Carol. “James Michener: Life and Literature, American Style.”
Washington Post
(September 19, 1976): F1.

Kilborn, Peter T. “Weekends with the President's Men.”
New York Times
(June 30, 2006): D1.