August 1, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Marketing a 21-room Victorian online

WINDHAM, NY: With her husband Leslie, Marianne Leman owns and runs Albergo Allegria, a 21-room landmark Victorian “B&B” in Windham NY. Rooms and suites run from $73 to $299 a night in season. For over a decade Marianna has been exploring how to attract new customers. She spoke about her experience using the Internet for marketing.

“Inquiries from new, non-repeat customers now come almost entirely (90%) from the Internet. I’ve just about stopped using print, it’s become of very limited value. I do still print up a brochure, but it’s very basic. Print advertising I limit to the local ski guides, and our county and state travel guides, everything else I’ve dropped. The Internet is much more effective. The return is greater.

“Instead, we spend our advertising dollars online. We advertise in hundreds of online travel directories. Many give you a free listing. Some, for around $10-15 a year, will add a link. Inclusion in major directories is more expensive, usually $100 or more a year.”

I asked Marianna how she tracks where her visitors came from. Does she analyse her own web-site log files? “No, I don’t have time. I have used WebTrends.” WebTrends is a premium web-traffic-analysis service. “But from now on I’ll be relying for traffic reports on the company designing and hosting our new web site, rarebrick.com.”

Most of her tracking consists of just asking customers where they came from. “The software we use for recording reservations lets us add entries to drop down menus. We have one menu just for online sources. The first entry is our own web site, then it lists 25-30 other sources—nyc getaways is one of them. We’re always adding new ones, as we find out about them. This is separate from the usual ‘source’ menu with ‘AAA’ and ‘Walk-in.’ This one is just for online.

“I haven’t come up any special tricks for finding where people come from. I just ask them. If they say, from our web site, I ask, where did you come from before that? Often they don’t know. I don’t press them. You can’t badger them, they just want to make a reservation.”

Marianna had a web site designed for the Inn several years ago, and she’s been pleased with it. But she’s decided to invest in a larger site with more up-to-date design. “It’s time,” she said. “The Internet has proven itself to be a good source of revenue.”

Though the service is available, the new site won’t take online reservations. “We tried it,” Marianna said, “but it just doesn’t seem to work well. I feel you must keep reservations personal. We used WorldRes for a while, but after getting a reservation online I would still feel I had to call the customer and introduce myself. Anyway, they raised the commission to 15%, and cancelations become a big problem. I concluded that having someone else take reservations for you just doesn’t work.”

Marianna likes to stay on the cutting edge of Internet marketing. Where does she see herself focusing her attention in the future? “Continuing to check out new directories. We’re always looking for more directories to advertise in. I even have someone helping me with that now. We browse in search engines as if we were customers looking for something like us, and see what new directories we come across. Then we check out what’s involved in being featured.”

In June, Marianna identified two reservations coming from 54 visitors from NYC Getaways' "Quickway,' for a conversion rate of close to 4%.

END

Marianna can be reached at (518) 734-5560. The inn's URL is http://www.AlbergoUSA.com. The new site is due to launch shortly.