I have spent the past few weeks thinking about why guest houses and BnBs struggle to fill their beds. It is not just the sixteen other local offerings that compete although that does not help either.
Rather it is that most of us travellers really fear risk much, much more than we want bliss.
Our hero, a good looking dude who hails from Oslo, looks for a place to stay in Cape Town. After fighting through the hundreds of pages all purporting to offer him travel nirvana, he opts for the City Lodge at the harbour. Why?
He does it for the same reason that he goes to McDonalds rather than a fine steak house or pub with a name he does not know: Because he knows exactly what he will get. Hotels tend to be much more of a muchness, so he is not going to get surprised.
No doubt he will complain mightily because the last City Lodge he stayed at in Tel Aviv did not serve ham or bacon at breakfast. But if he eats a Big Mac and chips (much as Norwegians are not crazy about anything other than fish and potatoes, preferably boiled) he does not have to worry about throwing the better part of the cost of his return trip at some quaint South African dish involving worms and raw meat – no matter how much it moves him.
Most tourists don’t like surprises. The kind of surprises I refer to are when you arrive at your guest house to find that it is being rebuilt. (Although that happened to me at the Sandton Crowne Plaza a few times.) Or when there is no Web connection. (Which some of us need more than morning coffee, and maybe even morning oxygen.) Or when the owners are in the middle of a divorce and the tension is a tad unsettling. (But that’s for some other time.)
So, if surprises are bad, then consistency is good – no matter how low the standard is.
Most guesthouses cost a lot less than an hotel. And most of the time the owner is there to point you at the best stuff to see around the area. (Unlike most lesser hotels where the workers seem to be imported from the planet Mute because they barely speak, let alone any language I know.)
So, when I am in Cape Town I now stay at Jambo Guest House in Green Point – when Barry and Mina have space. It costs less than most hotels, except possibly the chain which combines the shower, toilet, and the basin into a cubicle the size of my trashcan, in a room where I can reach the window and the door from my bed, at the same time.
For much the same price, I get a glorious bed, a large romping space with wireless Internet, a fine bathroom with fluffy towels, a short walk to a superb steak with great Shiraz, a short walk to the V&A Waterfront, and a short walk into Cape Town. This makes it a great place for a business traveller.
Don’t get me started on the huge breakfast. Norwegians are not slim and trim because, as you might suspect, they are genetically blessed. Rather it is the astounding price of food that keeps us all in a state of semi starvation. So SA meals are all much better, especially Jambo’s breakfast which makes a Norwegian smorgasbord look rather sad.
Barry also has a pub where that last hour before bed passes gently fueled by great SA Shiraz and planning early retirement, which in my case now means 69. But hey, if it means I can travel to South Africa at will, and that’s the whole of July this year, then it can’t be too bad.
But, and here is my point. I stayed up the road at the City Lodge for years before making the change, and only because I knew him well by then and had run out of excuses. Small establishments are not competing with each other. They are competing first with our desire to reduce risk. This human condition is fascinating.