iBooked Online

Awards look like vanity. Follow the money and they’re anything but.

Here’s the actual chain. Strong reviews get you noticed by the travel companies. The travel companies hand out the awards. The awards generate PR. The PR creates demand.

And demand is the only thing that gives you the confidence to charge what you’re worth.

That’s not a feel-good story. That’s a return on investment. And it’s why the properties sitting at the top of the rankings didn’t get there by accident. They went and got it.

This week I sat down with Marco DiDomizio, who bought a sleepy nine-room inn in 2016, turned it into the top-rated bed and breakfast in the United States three years running, then sold it profitably in 2025.

Every operator would like the award. Almost nobody can tell you the sequence that produces one.

Marco can.

Step one: ask the question nobody asks.

He was talking about linens. Theirs had to be cotton. Never a blend, never polyester.

When he asks other operators why they went with the blend, the answer is always some version of the same thing. It’s easier to launder. Dries faster. Doesn’t wrinkle.

His response stopped me cold: is that about you, or is that about the guest?

Run that question across your whole operation and it gets uncomfortable fast. The check-in process. The messaging sequence. The coffee in the room. Half of it was designed around your convenience and you’ve stopped noticing.

Nothing else in this chain works until you fix that. You cannot solicit your way to a top ranking if the stay doesn’t deserve one.

Step two: spend where the guest can feel it.

Not everything you can renovate is worth renovating.

Bathrooms. Air conditioning. Bigger beds. Better food. Those raise your rate and they show up in reviews.

A beautiful kitchen is lovely. The guest never sees it. That one waits.

Now here’s the number I want you to sit with.

They took a loan to gut all the bathrooms. Repayments were around six hundred dollars a month. The rate increase afterwards recouped that entire monthly repayment in a single night.

One night. The other twenty-nine were profit.

His only regret across nine years is that he waited too long to do it.

Step three: put a human in the stay.

Marco was at breakfast every single morning. Not out of duty. That was the intelligence operation.

How’s the stay going. Where are you headed today. What can I sort out for you.

Over fifty percent of their business ended up being repeat guests.

The big hotel groups structurally can’t do this. Too many staff, no consistency. Short-term rentals can’t do it either, because nobody’s physically there.

If you’re running STRs, Marco’s workaround is simple. A mid-stay check-in card on the door. The inspector doing a quick personal drop-in.

And the point isn’t the warm feeling. It’s that you get to fix the problem before it becomes a review.

Step four: ask properly.

Everyone knows they should ask for reviews. Almost nobody does it well.

Marco’s version: a handwritten note at checkout with a small memento. A few dollars, nothing that feels like a bribe. Alongside it, a business-card-sized reminder with the review platform logos on it, small enough to slip into a wallet or photograph on a phone.

It’s the restaurant mints trick. Same psychology, same result.

Step five: fund the machine.

This is where most operators quietly opt out.

They spent around two thousand dollars a month on a marketing partner. From a couple of months after they bought the place. When the revenue wasn’t there yet.

Terrifying at the start. A rounding error by the end.

Monthly calls were half analytics, half strategy. Which awards are we chasing. Which publications do we want to be in. Condé Nast or Travel and Leisure. How do we get there.

Most operators hope the awards turn up. Marco went and got them.

One more thing worth stealing. They wrote local activity content so thorough that their posts on the bike path and the whale watching outranked TripAdvisor on Google. That’s how you stop being a listing in your area and become the authority on it.

And that matters more now, not less, because the AI systems recommending places to stay are reading exactly that kind of content.

 

What you’ll learn in this episode:

🏆 The sequence that turns a sleepy property into an award-winning one

🛁 Which renovations pay back, and which ones are just for you

✍️ The checkout ritual that converts good stays into public reviews

🤝 How to build a personal touchpoint when you’re not on site

🔍 Why their local blog posts outranked TripAdvisor on Google

 

Marco and his husband left corporate careers in New York, Marco in finance and his husband in architecture, to buy an underperforming nine-room inn in 2016. Neither had any hospitality experience. Nine years later it was the top-rated bed and breakfast in the United States and one of the top thirty hotels in the world. Marco now advises operators and buyers, chairs the B&B committee at his local chamber of commerce, and runs a weekend intensive for aspiring innkeepers.

One last thing, and it’s the most honest part of the whole conversation.

Marco said those aspiring innkeeper weekends quickly reveal that some people in the room shouldn’t be doing this at all. They don’t like food. Or they don’t like people. Or they don’t like cleaning.

All three are non-negotiable in this business.

That’s a kinder version of the truth than anyone selling you passive income will ever give you.

 

📺Watch the episode here

🎙️Listen to the show here