We ran into retired innkeeper Mary Lynn Tucker in West Virginia, where she was leading a seminar for aspiring innkeepers. She explained that just buying an inn doesn't make you an innkeeper - it takes time. Here are some ways she suggested to test if you're really an innkeeper.

• If your son calls and wants to bring his family home for the weekend, and you ask, "on which major credit card would you like to put that reservation?"… you might be an innkeeper.
• If you're having a meal out and find yourself refilling coffee cups all around the restaurant… you might be an innkeeper.
• You are finally climbing into bed after an exhausting 18-hour day, and you find the covers turned down and a chocolate mint on your pillow… you might be an innkeeper.
• If you're driving down the interstate, and see a sign reading, "clean rest rooms ahead," and you pull off, put on your rubber gloves and get to work with your cleanser and scrub brush... you are definitely an innkeeper!

Any other examples you'd like to add? Just email InnkeeperNews@BedandBreakfast.com.

Tracking customer retention, by satisfaction and defection, is not enough, according to a report in the McKinsey Quarterly. "Defecting customers are far less of a problem than customers who change their buying patterns," explain authors Stephanie Coyles and Timothy Gokey. A study of 1200 households indicated the importance of monitoring customer spending to prevent downward migration and defection. "Managing migration, from the satisfied customers who spend more, to the downward migrators who spend less, is a crucial step." Loyalty profiles - emotive, inertial, deliberative - are also explained, along with the importance of responding to customers' changing needs and dealing with customer dissatisfaction. "Avoiding and addressing service failures, for example, is obviously important; customers who have had them resolved are typically just as loyal, and sometimes more so, than customers who have never had [complaints] at all." We recommending printing out this lengthy article and reading it slowly, to identify the comments that apply to the B&B industry.

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