The Site: BedAndBreakfast.com
- BedAndBreakfast.com was founded in 1995
Worldwide listing of bed and breakfasts, B&B homestays, country inns, lodges, cabins, historic hotels, small resorts, guest ranches, farmhouse accommodations, and working farm and ranch vacationsSearch by location (clickable map), amenities, online bookings, recipes, special packages, last-minute availability
- BedAndBreakfast.com Hot Deals
- Highly recommended by The New York Times, Real Simple, Forbes, Time, Newsweek Travel & Leisure, USA TODAY and many other news sources
- “Getaway Gift Card” – Bed & Breakfast gift cards which are free of fees and expiration dates
- BedAndBreakfast.com Blog & Newsletter
- B&B guest reviews
- The BedandBreakfast.com Report
The Good:
The pleathora of guest reviews and ratings are very helpful. You will find at least 4 photos of every BedAndBreakfast.com property. Included with each listing is information on the Innkeepers along with the languages they speak, which you may find important when traveling internationally. We also find the BedAndBreakfast.com search engine very user friendly with a clickable map, and it is super-quick! The “live comments” from gift card purchasers are cool too.
The Bad:
We don’t like the “Booking Wiz” pop up advertisement. Booking wiz is not a very good search engine, and we hate pop-ups. Their “flight search engine” is Booking Wiz, which we are not particularily fond of.
The Fees *:
BedandBreakfast.com Guarantee states that within 24 hours of your booking, if you find a better price for the same room on the same date(s) at the same B&B, BedandBreakfast.com will refund the difference to you. Cancellation policy varies per property booked. Always read prior to booking. *Based solely on research done by TravelSiteCritic.com, these figures may be inaccurate and are subject to change. Double check before you buy.
I have serious reservations about reliability of property reviews on bedandbreakfast.com and would not use their site as sole source of information on a property but check other travel sites first to make sure things jive. There have been reports on Trip Advisor of properties with 100% glowing reviews on bedandbreakfast.com but not so positive reviews elsewhere, and — surprise — it was the latter that turned out more accurate.
One major issue is that bedandbreakfast.com screens ONLY negative reviews. If you rate anything under 3 stars on any aspect, you get an e-mail from them, “Please supply us proof of stay in the form of your accommodation receipt or documentation of your payment to the property”. The fact of the matter is, most people when confronted by this extra requirement — and potential invasion of privacy that it represents — would probably back out. On the other hand, positive reviews on bedandbreakfast.com get posted within one business day, without requiring any proof of stay.
Elsewhere, bedandbreakfast.com claims that they don’t screen positive reviews because false positive reviews are rare…if so, then why would Yelp decide to apply filters that apply to both positive AND negative reviews? Whether you agree or not with filters in the first place, at least using them equally provides some semblance of fairness. It therefore does seem suspicious that bedandbreakfast.com filters only negative reviews. Then again, since bedandbreakfast.com has a certain financial stake in selling gift certificates that can be applied to some properties listed on their site — and bedandbreakfast.com has even paid per-review kickbacks to properties in the past for getting their customers to post reviews on the site (Google it) — it DOES make sense they would promote positive reviews and discourage negative reviews.
Not saying all their reviews are questionable, but getting mostly the pluses without being able to hear about minuses IS questionable IMO.