News Roundup

Small Hotel Owners Say Web Service Cuts Them Out

May 27, 2002 - Vol. 95 - Issue 100 - Page 5
BY Brett Clanton, Staff Writer
New Orleans CityBusiness

Claiming publicly funded tourism agencies in New Orleans all but ignore their interests, a local group of small hotel and bed-and-breakfast owners has taken self-promotion into its own hands.

The Professional Innkeepers Association of New Orleans, or Piano, is a coalition of about 45 small hotel owners that organized in late 2000 to advocate on behalf of the fragmented niche and to market member hotels. This month, the group makes the most visible show of its work to date, launching an online hotel room booking service at the Piano Web site.

Piano members say the site offers an alternative to TurboTrip.com, the locally based hotel booking engine that the city’s biggest tourism promotion agencies — the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau and the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. — use as a default booking service at their Web sites.

“TurboTrip really doesn’t represent bed and breakfasts very well,” says Piano President Patrick Ashton, owner of Ashton’s Bed and Breakfast on Esplanade Avenue. He explains that TurboTrip’s requirement to set aside rooms for the service and the 10% commission charge on each room booked through the site may be easy for large hotels to swing but are not always cost-effective for small hotels. In addition, he says, the TurboTrip listings don’t do an adequate job of distinguishing bed and breakfast properties from, say, budget motels off Interstate 10.

Yet if a hotel chooses not to use the service, he says, it reduces its chances of getting business from the popular convention and visitors bureau or tourism marketing corporation Web sites.

Because TurboTrip is such a key tool in the city’s tourism marketing efforts, Piano members say small hotel properties with around 25 rooms or fewer are paying into a system that doesn’t adequately serve them.

Every hotel in Orleans Parish is required to add a 12% hotel-motel tax onto each room rental, the proceeds of which help fund the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau and the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. Those groups, in turn, market the city to business and leisure travelers.

Piano members have complaints, not about the way the tourist agencies advertise, but about what the organizations do with the inquiries they receive from advertisements. Both agencies try to steer inquiries to their Web sites — www.neworleanscvb.com and www.neworleansonline.com — where guests are encouraged to reserve hotel rooms online through TurboTrip.

A spokeswoman for the convention and visitors bureau did not know the terms of its agreement with TurboTrip or if the bureau receives a cut of the site’s commission on room rentals. TurboTrip did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.

Beverly Gianna, the bureau’s vice president of public affairs, says often the hotel owners who complain of being underrepresented on TurboTrip are the ones who fail to update their room availability on the site. “It’s up to (the hotel owner) to input their inventory” at TurboTrip, she says.

After meeting with Piano members last year, convention and visitors bureau officials added a “Bed and Breakfast Guide” button to its home page, directing visitors to a list of 37 bed and breakfast properties that pay bureau dues. However, only those properties that submit to TurboTrip’s terms can receive online reservations at the bureau site. The tourism marketing corporation does not have a special listing for small hotels or bed and breakfast properties at its Web site; it routes all inquiries through TurboTrip.

Piano is trying to get the tourism agencies to link the Piano Web site to its own sites.

Ashton says the Piano Web site, www.bbnola.com, will not charge a commission for booking hotel rooms. Of the $150 Piano members pay in annual dues to be a part of the organization, $50 will go to supporting the site, says Ashton.

Jo Ann Hilton, owner of the 22-room St. Charles Avenue Guest House, says piggybacking on the city-sponsored sites may be the best bet for bringing exposure to small hotels in New Orleans. Trying to get Internet surfers to land on her hotel’s Web site is already a chore, she says, especially since many large hotel groups have bought up key Internet search words like “bed and breakfast” or “guest house.”

“We just want equal representation on these sites,” says Hilton.

But Kevin Bourgeois, the manager of the eight-room 1896 O’Malley Guest House in Mid-City and a TurboTrip customer, has no complaints with the current system. Nor does he believe TurboTrip’s 10% commission fee is asking too much. “I’m happy to pay 10% if it means getting customers here,” he says.

Piano was originally formed under a different name and concerned chiefly with exposing unlicensed bed and breakfast properties. But that concern has taken a backseat to marketing efforts since a change of leadership in 2000.