Rainforestinn's B&B Blog -- El Yunque, Puerto Rico

Promoting your inn with Google maps and Google earth

I think google maps is a great idea so I submitted my bed and breakfast to their directory. In order to prove to Google that our business is legitimate you put your mailing address in the application and google mails out a confirmation post card. This is where the reality of Puerto Rico comes in. Nearly everyone who lives out in the country in Puerto Rico has a mailing address that is no where near their physical address, either because they have a post office box in town like us or because they use rural route directions which were invented by someone who was confused by maps and maybe dyslexic too. If google could offer the option of sending out the confirmation cards by UPS or FedEx that would have worked or Google could allow the incorrect address to be edited (which they don't even when you put in your confirmation number from the mailed-out card).

To make this even more interesting we had some of the google map employees themselves stay with us as guests a couple of months ago (the rainforestinn tends to attract guests that are scientists and professionals and even Google geniuses). I explained the problem to them but so far they haven't implemented a solution. This means that the correct location for the rainforest inn -- see this URL

http://tinyurl.com/2bwd3y

does not match the directions that come up when you search businesses for lodging in the rainforest. I'm not even going to go into all the large hotels which come up in that search and the fact that none of them are in the rainforest. The El Yunque rainforest is a popular tourist attraction now and everyone is claiming to be there.

But I wouldn't be writing this blog if I hadn't found a solution to share with you. First off if you look at your google maps business listing (or someone else's) you will notice that there is an option to write a review about the place but no one seems to have any reviews written about their place. This is an indication that maybe google maps business directory has a way to go yet before it is that important for your business.

Maybe more people are using google earth. The nice thing about google earth is that it works with http://www.panoramio.com/ to let you place a photograph of a location. Go there and sign-up for an account. After you add the photo you are then given the option to place it on the map. Be sure you find the exact location (easiest done by typing in the name of a nearby city and zooming in to move the marker).

I ended up with: http://www.panoramio.com/map/?user=898653#lt=18.336103&ln=-65.813384&z=0

Now the next step is to just wait until google earth is updated and your photo is placed. Too bad google business isn't that easy.

Secrets of rennovating a bed and breakfast inn

Lots of other bed and breakfast operators have been reading my blog. Some have asked me how we manage to complete all the construction work we've done here so I thought I'd let everyone in on our secret. When Laurie and I first bought the property we were looking at an estate home that had been ravaged by two hurricanes and left abandoned for six years. Just so we could walk around the property safely we filled six thirty-yard garbage dumpsters of unusable material. The beautiful cedar from the main house we recycled to build the vaulted ceiling on the new villa. Some of the antique furniture we repaired and re-finished.

But how did two people, one who is still running his Caribbean shipping agency (probably the smallest in the world but still the down island trading ships arrive at 3 am or Sunday or whenever their schedule demands and they are demanding) cope? The scope of the tasks we have accomplished and some of the pending projects would be considered insurmountable by many.  We certainly couldn't have accomplished so much in the usual manner. And we know about the usual manner because many of our guests ask how come we have been working on this place for nearly five years now and it isn't finished.

But, the usual manner would have required truck loads of money to pay the teams of contractors that come in and get it all done in a professional and seemingly effortless stream of busy workers and material deliveries. If we had the cash flow to do it like that we would probably elect to stay in someone else's beautiful romantic hideaway. But we are doing it on the cheap so we can live in our own paradise hide-away. Still, there is (and was) far too much work here for one busy couple to do even without sleeping and certainly  cutting into the average American's six hours of television viewing time (luckily we don't have TV).

I think it was Laurie who came up with the solution to our problem. It was certainly her that had to do most of the extra work involved so she was motivated. Our solution was to advertise for volunteers to come and stay with us for two or three months. We would feed them and house them and even teach them a trade in return for the work they perform on one of our projects.

For the past two months we have been closed and lots of working is getting done with the volunteer's help. Pictures tell a thousand words so the following are some pictures of our volunteers working (and resting with our dogs after working). We have also added some new short videos to our youtube site. Go to rainforestinn's youtube videos -- we will keep adding new ones, mainly showing our volunteers in action.

Hurricane Dean

Thanks everybody for thinking of us and sending emails about how we were doing. Hurricane Dean passed well south of us. We got some rain and a little gusty wind but that was it. One of our neighbors lost a roof but that couldn't have been a very strong roof.

We spent about a week doing preparations so now we have our generator installed (great thing that is as many of our guests haven't lived in Puerto Rico for thirty years like us and don't ignore as easily little inconveniences like no water and no electricity that happens so often here). Having the new genset installed is one more step towards making our small bed & breakfast more serving of our customer's needs (don't worry we aren't going to ever become a big resort). We are also taking advantage of the slow season to build a pool and jacuzzi as well as completely re-build the bathroom in the chalet.

When we moved the lumber pile down below the new pool deck we found a cute little pair of boas living there.

I think the may have eggs somewhere but so far we haven't seen any. The new pool deck is truly giant. I used twenty yards of concrete (two big, very noisy, cement trucks) to pour the new deck. I'm glad we were closed as I had no idea how noisy a cement truck is. We are looking forward to season when we can stop doing all this construction and enjoy the rainforest sounds and having guests again.

Technorati Tags: b&b, bed and breakfast, boas, el yunque, nature, puerto rico, rainforest, travel

Posting travel reviews on Tripadvisor

Lately Tripadvisor can be the single most important internet presence for getting new customers to your guest house. As I reported in my first post about Tripadvisor, many hotel owners are promoting their bed and breakfasts by making up their own wildly positive posts or having friends do it. The only way that the Tripadvisor mavens can tell that this is happening (if you use different email addresses) would be by the IP address always being the same.  Sometimes guests log-on while staying at your place and post from your IP address (we have WIFI access everywhere using our microwave connection directly from the El Yunque peak towers). If we know, we usually ask them to wait until they get home before posting a review and most times this takes away the spontaneity and a review never gets written.

Our guests at the rainforestinn here in Rio Grande tend to be internet savvy people who are familiar with web 2.0 and some of the drawbacks of the new social networking. So when they see a bed and breakfast listing that has a hundred or so perfect glowing reviews they suspect something is awry and check further. One way that Tripadvisor offers is a simple click on who is posting the review and then look at their other postings. From this you can see right away that it is a real vacationer and you also might learn about other cool places to stay (or places to stay away from) when you're visiting Puerto Rico.

Another of the drawbacks with web 2.0 is the omni-present spam bots. It is the reason why I'm blogging to you on Typepad right now (my Wordpress blog died under a bot inundation). To run a successful social web ap you have to put traps in place to stop the bots. This means blocking certain IP address and having mult-step login processes with a "captcha" picture that can't be read by the spam bots. The drawback to complex login processes are that sometimes it becomes just too hard for someone to post a comment or a review and they give up. For example the following review was sent to me by one of our guests that had given up but emailed it to us because they still wanted their review seen.  Here is what our last guests at the rain forest inn had to say:

"We visited the Rain Forest Inn for our spring break in March 2007.  We arrived very late at night–our plane being delayed–and to our surprise we were graciously met by Bill.  He showed us to our room–really the chalet. As you can imagine we were quite tired and ready to hit the bed.  The chalet is charming–nice large living room/kitchen, our bedroom overlooked the rainforest with windows on 2 sides which made for great breezes and great sounds of tree frogs ( coquis ).  We had a lovely porch overlooking the premises on the front of the chalet.

The next morning we had a super breakfast prepared by Laurie.

  She told us about all the various things we could do and if we wanted to simply relax that was just fine, too.

What we liked about the Rain Forest Inn--wonderful, quiet location, great breakfast, very nice folks to spend a week with and get to know.  I would recommend it to anyone."

-- Marcia, Winnetka, IL

Laurie and I always love to read the comments are guests make after staying with us. It makes every effort we put in to make their vacations special worth it.

The best Web site about El Yunque

I would like to take this moment to recommend a web site that is "chock full" of information about the El Yunque rainforest of Puerto Rico. This web site is more important for planing your Puerto Rico vacation than eating dark chocolate is for your health.

It is elyunque.com and go ahead, leave my blog and go directly there. You will find the web site and the links to the information are laid out exactly the way a tourist visitor would want it. And it doesn't stop at just El Yunque (what are you doing still here? -- go check it out) there is extensive information about travel in Puerto Rico. Places to stay ( like that cool rainforestinn place) things to do, restaurants, travel advice etc.

The bed and breakfast owners go on vacation

Tomorrow Laurie and I will be celebrating the first day in three months that we have no guests. It has been a busy season with nearly 100% bookings. I also have no ships until Thursday so we will be relaxing. Our last vacation was a disappointment. I decided to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary by taking Laurie to a bed and breakfast I’d heard about that is right on the beach in the Condado (San Juan). We scheduled it for the 17th and the 18th, which was the only two nights that we could get someone to watch our inn. Because this blog will contain some negative comments about the place we stayed in I’m not going to mention the name as many people have stayed there and had a much better experience than we did. Perhaps our experience was a fluke or just resulted from our own twisted high expectations.

The first thing that went wrong happened on the 17th. A ship in Fajardo decided, last minute, to take a charter voyage to St. Thomas that we had to enter late that night.

To avoid checking in after they were closed we made a special trip to San Juan to check in early before driving all the way back to Fajardo for the ship arrival that night at 9 pm. So that also spoiled our first evening’s romantic dinner (I think we had subway sandwiches). The boat was also late so we didn’t actually arrive at our room until 1 in the morning or so.

When we arrived there for our special early check-in (earlier that day at 4 pm) we discovered the second thing to go awry. The place was on the beach all right and it was a popular beach. There was no parking anywhere near the hotel and the hotel did not have a parking lot for guests (or for anyone). Laurie dropped me off to check in and she drove around the block looking for parking. It wasn’t an auspicious sign. The clerk who checked me in was cordial but the rates turned out to be much higher than only a light reading of the web site would reveal.

On the Condado Beach Inn’s web site – if you read the fine print – you will see that rates are based on “single” occupancy and that there is a $20 extra charge for the second person (I didn’t notice that). I also didn’t notice that on top of the room tax they are charging a city tax and they also charge a 15% service charge! We know about the 9% room tax in Puerto Rico because we have to charge it to our guests and that many resort hotels in Puerto Rico also charge other fees, parking fees (which this place wished it could charge) and resort fees (which this place couldn’t charge as there was no resort). I ended up paying much more than I thought it would be. I think this practice of adding fees to the advertised price is kind of sneaky. It could also destroy someone’s travel plans that had a carefully worked out budget.

The room was small. It had air conditioning and a TV. We don’t have any TV’s at the The Rainforest Inn so it was interesting to re-affirm that not having hundreds of channels of 24 hour entertainment but having fast internet instead really gives you more choice (with podcasts and . I was surprised to learn that they didn’t have WIFI. The room did have one nice feature that we liked; it is difficult for us to go to other bed and breakfast inns without noticing improvements for our place and we are always looking. There was an electronic safe in the bathroom closet (and I won’t even go into the concept of a bathroom closet except to say that there wasn’t also a normal closet in the room). The safe was large enough to put my laptop computer in – which I always have to take with me but not necessarily at the dinner table or to the movies. We have already ordered similar safes for our bed and breakfast. They were only $120 each on eBay. The furniture in the room was modern, made of compressed bamboo. There was also a small fridge loaded with some things like bottled water and soda with price list that was high enough to let us know to replace anything we might consume before checking out.

The next morning we got up to enjoy the breakfast. It was served continental style on a table in the restaurant. The hotel was wrapped around a small restaurant that served dinners on beach side tables. The restaurant is well known and gets good reviews and was one of the reasons we picked this hotel to stay at. The breakfast was coffee, pastries and fruit. One of the pastries was ok and they did have decaf coffee. The fruit wasn’t ripe but it looked decorative.

After breakfast we relaxed in the lounge chairs on the beach. I had my laptop computer out to get some work done (finishing NOAD reports for U.S. Customs). Laurie got me a towel to roll-up and use as a pillow after I finished. There were no beach towels in the room. This is when the third thing happened that spoiled the vacation for Laurie and made it so we could never recommend this place to any of our guests. The hotel had about ten beach chairs with umbrellas put out for guests to enjoy. There was also tables and chairs set-up for the restaurant. There were also six or seven other guests lounging like us or sitting at the tables eating their breakfast. Just after I laid down the hotel manager called out to us from the pool area (in the next paragraph I will describe the pool because it needs describing). He yelled loud enough for all the other guests to hear, saying “are you two guests here?” asking us what we were doing on his lounge chairs. I don’t know what made him think we weren’t guests. Then he went on to berate us for taking one of the towels out of the room. When we explained that there were no beach towels he got us a couple of ratty beach towels from somewhere. This unnecessary public disturbance upset Laurie and put a large spoiler into our anniversary vacation.

We have a swimming pool at The Rainforest Inn. It is badly damaged and we have been trying to decide what to do with it. Some of our options are:

1. Repair it as is (small kidney shaped pool)
2. Make it smaller and more interesting looking.
3. Put landscaping, rocks etc and use black concrete and add a waterfall to make it a natural swimming pool and then have a very large Jacuzzi above it which is what everyone will end up using (because it will be heated) and it is usually a little cold here for swimming.

4. Make it much smaller and just a decorative garden pool not for swimming.

5. Fill it in and make a Zen garden there and also install a Jacuzzi.

We are probably going to go with option three. We are in the rainforest and even if a natural pool would not look as fancy in our advertising photos as a torques blue typical pool we still like the idea. It fits with our recycling, collecting rainwater, and composting garbage low impact environmental methods.

The pool at the Condado hotel was just a bit bigger than a plastic kiddie pool. It was set in the hotel’s tiny courtyard so that walking to and from the beach or the main gate involved carefully skirting the edge of the pool so as not to fall in.

No one swam in the pool while we were there and its very public location in front of the sliding door to the restaurant and its tiny size made it very unappealing. I think the pool was just built so that they could say in advertisements (like the web site description) that they had a pool. The dead crab that was lounging on one end the entire time we were there may have also discouraged bathers.
We learned something else from this short vacation. When your day-to-day life is in the most incredible vacation spot on earth (at least that is how we feel about being lucky enough to live at the Rainforest Inn) then staying anywhere else, no matter how nice, will always be a disappointment.

Technorati Tags: bed and breakfast, puerto rico, travel