A stay at any Lake Superior bed-and-breakfast inn during the holiday season could melt even a Scrooge’s heart.

Take the Olcott House in Duluth, Minnesota. Outside, thousands of festive lights outline the romantic architecture of the 1904 Georgian Colonial. Hosts Barb and Don Trueman warmly greet you at the door, as does a life-sized St. Nick attended by a collection of jolly Santas. Across the hall, the home’s grand “Gone With the Wind” winding staircase beckons, decked with fragrant balsam. A Christmas tree towers in the library near comfortable chairs and a fire glows in the hearth. Rich, burgundy china in the dining room stands ready for tomorrow’s breakfast … perhaps the Olcott House’s famed wild rice scrambled eggs, stuffed croissants and herbed potatoes.

Here you can sip cider and sample homemade cookies while listening to holiday music. You can take a walk in the snow, hand-write Christmas cards, lose yourself in a good book. You can even treat yourself to a long winter’s nap.

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Members of the Duluth Historic Bed & Breakfast Association, from left, Alan Fink (Mathew S. Burrows 1890 Inn), Pat Hamon (Ellery House), Peg Lee (A. Charles Weiss Inn) and Kimberly Aparicio (Cotton Mansion) gather to sample the offerings for a special association event called Holiday Victorian Teas.

PHOTO BY LAKE SUPERIOR MAGAZINE

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While restoring your Christmas spirit with a back-in-time atmosphere, Barb and Don are cheerfully performing the juggling act crucial to management of a 21st century bed-and-breakfast inn: answering e-mail reservations from around the country, modifying their website, planning an advertising strategy and networking with other B&B owners, both regionally and nationally.

All around Lake Superior, today’s bed-and-breakfast innkeepers must be marketing wizards, inventing creative ways to draw guests. They’ve moved into cyberspace, which some say generates up to 70 percent of their reservations. Closer to home, they’re joining forces with other B&B owners to strengthen their place in the hospitality market.

A desire to pool advertising resources drew Duluth B&Bs together. Dave Lee, who owns the A. Charles Weiss Inn with his wife, Peg, feels Duluth inns now benefit in other ways by banding together. The Lees learned early the value of local colleagues. During the almost five years of restoration for their 1895 Victorian-style home, they met other B&B owners, who supported them as they learned the ropes for this hospitality industry niche.

In 1996, as that group sat around the table in the inn’s restored dining room, the association was born. Now the Historic Bed & Breakfast Inns of Duluth is a model for associations all over the country at the same time such groups form around Lake Superior.

“A rising tide lifts all boats,” says Dave, president of the Duluth association. “We’re all working for the same purpose - to make Duluth a destination of historic inns.”

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Special events like Wassail Concerts (right) at the Old Rittenhouse in Bayfield, Wisconsin - holiday dinners with a concert by the Rittenhouse Chamber Singers - and Duluth YesterDays (below) involve inns in their communities and encourage more guests.

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The Historic Bed & Breakfast Inns of Duluth represents 11 inns located only a few miles - sometimes blocks - from each other. Members must have buildings at least 50 years old, be members in the Minnesota State Bed & Breakfast Guild and be “quality-assured” for safety and cleanliness.

YesterDays to a Tea

Duluth’s historic bed-and-breakfast inns seek creative ways to invite the neighbors over while expanding interest in local history.

On December 2 and 9, the Historic Bed and Breakfast Inns of Duluth sponsors its third Victorian Holiday Teas. The progressive teas travel among five inns and are extremely popular, says coordinator Kimberly Aparicio, who owns Cotton Mansion in Duluth with husband Ken.

“The first year, we started with one tea and wondered if we could sell 400 tickets,” Kimberly says. This year, she expects a little more than 1,000 tickets to be sold.

“It does expose us to this (local) market,” she says, “but it’s also something nice to do for the community.”

Call 218-724-6405 for reservations.

Each spring the inns connect with the community through Duluth YesterDays. On May 3 through 5, 2002, events by Duluth museums and establishments will re-create a turn-of-the-century era.

Historic inns place their own stamp on YesterDays. Joan Halquist, who owns Ellery House with husband, Jim, plays violin in the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra. Their inn entertains guests with a “musicale.”

“We tried to re-create a Sunday afternoon Victorian tea in the parlor.”

Last year, Stanford Inn held an antique sale and the Manor on the Creek organized an afternoon bridge social.

Call 1-800-4-DULUTH for information.

“People took a big risk,” Dave says. “We started to look at this group of B&Bs like a business, and it started a whole new chapter for us. Very quickly, there was a lot of energy and a lot of creativity.”

“Co-opetition” - combining cooperation and competition - is a cutting-edge business trend born a few years ago in the decidedly un-cozy world of technology firms. As the bed-and-breakfast industry has grown, innkeepers in the same community or region have found ways to work together, especially by keeping current on room availability.

Association members refer guests to each other, advertise together, buy services and supplies together, organize events to improve awareness of B&Bs and share an association website that directs online visitors to members’ individual web pages.

Sometimes they share employees. Pat Hammond, an employee of Ellery House, works at other inns and “inn-sits” for association members. “I’ve never seen a business that works together as cooperatively and collaboratively as B&Bs do,” Pat says.

The Duluth association came about at the right time, Dave Lee feels, just as tourism in Duluth was reaching an all-time high and the Internet, a boon to these small businesses, was being used more widely.

The web challenge was - and is - how to avoid being a needle in a haystack when tens of thousands of “hits” can come up for a search of “bed and breakfast.”

Historic Bed & Breakfast Inns of Duluth created a joint web address to link to sites, like those of convention and visitor bureaus.

“Duluth has been a model for the state,” says Barb Trueman of The Olcott House and president of the Minnesota Bed & Breakfast Guild. “Because of Duluth’s history of having at one time more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States, we now have more historic inns than any city in Minnesota.” Many of these millionaires built beautiful, Victorian-style homes.

Membership expands options for guests, too. If one inn is full, inquiries need not be turned away. Collectively, the association can offer a choice of about 65 rooms.

“We’re like a nice-sized historic hotel,” Barb says, although this former owner of a Minneapolis travel agency knows that what B&B owners strive to offer their guests is more than a place to sleep. “The patron of a B&B is someone more interested in having an experience than just getting a room. There is a romance involved in this.”

Not linked just by business, innkeepers are friends who help in big, and small, ways. On a recent afternoon, Alan Fink, owner of the Mathew S. Burrows Inn with his wife, Kathy, could be found at the Olcott House helping Don to move furniture.

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St. Nick greets visitors to the Olcott House in Duluth, Minnesota, during the holidays. PHOTO BY BRUCE OJARD

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More formally, they help each other to move their businesses into greater success. They work together, for example, on four annual events: Victorian Holiday Teas; monthly dinners at Glensheen Mansion for inn guests from January through April; exclusive “Bedroom Slipper Tours” behind the scenes at Glensheen for summer guests; and Duluth YesterDays in spring. (See story.)

Members not only work with each other, they agree not to work against each other. An association ground rule bans advertising that claims one inn is better than another.

Duluth member inns are remarkably noncompetitive … or not so remarkable because experienced B&B owners know that once someone has had a good experience at an inn, even if it’s not their inn, that person continues to be a loyal B&B customer.

B&B fans often like to try out different inns, collecting experiences. Since each inn has a unique ambience - formal, cozy, romantic and so on - a particular establishment might provide the right experience for a visitor on one occasion, but a different inn might be better suited at another time. Whether guests come as honeymooners, old college friends, re-unioning relatives or business travelers may change their needs.

“Every inn has its own style,” Dave says. “When someone stops in, e-mails or calls and is looking for specific amenities that we don’t have, we’re happy to send them on to another B&B that has what they’re looking for.”

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Dressing up for the holidays with an old-fashioned flair is one way that bed-and-breakfast inns make winter stays extra special. Cotton Manor in Duluth, Minnesota, decks its halls and sitting rooms to match the dark ornamental wood of the house (left and below). PHOTOS BY BRUCE OJARD

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Many Lake Superior locales boast beautiful and successful B&B cooperation.

“Associations are getting to be a very important part of the B&B industry - they’re happening all over the country,” says Jerry Phillips, executive director of the Professional Association of Innkeepers International and owner of Bayfield’s Old Rittenhouse Inn with his wife, Mary.

Although Bayfield’s bed-and-breakfast establishments haven’t created a formal association, Old Rittenhouse Inn pioneered plans for events to keep all of the area’s B&Bs busier during the off-season. The “Rit,” as it’s nicknamed, opened in Bayfield in 1973.

“The Wassail Concerts and Christmas at the Rit became so huge for us that all of the spin-off went to the other inns in town,” Jerry says. “We send our overflow to the other B&Bs during those special event weekends.”

Rittenhouse’s concerts accommodate 65 guests, the Phillips can take only about a third of those guests overnight at their three inns, so they refer them to other B&Bs in town.

“Guests are happier if they can stay at a B&B, so everybody can win,” says Jerry.

On Lake Superior’s Minnesota shore, North Shore Bed & Breakfast Association started in 1989 and has 12 member inns. Early on, it developed a brochure because Minnesota Department of Tourism Travel Centers allows only associations on its kiosks. That association covers a wide territory - the shoreline from Little Marais to the Canadian border and inland eight miles.

Scott Beattie, owner of Pincushion Mountain Bed & Breakfast and a member of the North Shore association, says that about half of his bookings come from e-mail inquiries through the association’s website.

A peek at web pages shows the sorts of “concierge” services innkeepers offer guests, sometimes even before they arrive. Historic Bed & Breakfast Inns of Duluth provides information about local antique and book shops, massage therapy, historic dining and other tips that help guests to plan their visit.

Offering extra information and service works well for groups like the Michigan Upper Peninsula Bed & Breakfast Association, with 22 member inns sprinkled across a 400-mile region. Besides a website, the group publishes a directory and advertises together.

“We’re a marketing and education association,” says Linda Gamble. Linda and husband Jeff own Big Bay Point Lighthouse B&B in Michigan. “It’s very cooperative. We are so spread out; there’s not more than one or two B&Bs in a town. When guests are trying to plan a trip across the Upper Peninsula, we can help.” The association holds an annual workshop to hone skills for running a successful B&B.

The Historic Bed and Breakfast Inns of Duluth - www.DuluthBandB.com

North Shore Bed & Breakfast Association - www.northshorebb.com

Michigan Upper Peninsula Bed & Breakfast Association - www.upbnb.com

North of Superior Bed & Breakfast Association - www.bbcanada.com/associations/fobba

Federation of Ontario Bed and Breakfast Accommodations - www.fobba.com

Lighthouse B&Bs, a rare breed, offer an additional market. Referrals between Lake Superior’s three lighthouse B&Bs - Big Bay and Sand Hills in Michigan, Two Harbors in Minnesota - are not formal. That goes on informally, says Rachelle Maloney with the Lighthouse Bed & Breakfast in Two Harbors. “We talk about them and they talk about us. People come here (because) they are looking to stay in a lighthouse.”

In and near Thunder Bay, Ontario, 15 establishments make up the North of Superior Bed & Breakfast Association, which advertises jointly, posts a website and hosts gatherings to share information.

“We rotate meetings at different places so we can get a better picture of what each B&B has to offer,” says Arnold Aylward, owner of Captain’s Quarters, South Gillies. “It’s not what you would call cutthroat in any way.”

There’s an unwritten code among successful innkeepers, says Paulette Anholm of the Old Shore Beach B&B and a member of the North Shore association.

“If we had a mission statement,” she says, “it would be: ‘Keep them in a B&B.’”

Gail Trowbridge, a Duluth-based writer, admits to a soft spot for B&Bs. She and her husband became engaged at Pincushion Mountain Bed & Breakfast in Minnesota.

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