Seeing America mile-by-mile
CARL E. FEATHER / Star Beacon

Bed-and-breakfast owner provides content for North American web site about highway attractions

By CARL E. FEATHER
Lifestyle Editor

Thanks to Jack Carpenter and milebymile.com, many area tourism-related businesses are getting free advertising on the Internet. Carpenter, who owns and operates the Chamomile Bed and Breakfast with his wife Barbara, is one of 200 volunteer highway stewards for the Web directory milebymile.com and its metric equivalent milebymile.com. The websites provides travelers with a list of attractions along North American highways that have been adopted by the stewards.

Stewards like Carpenter drive the roads, make notes about attractions and their mile marker location, and upload their information to milebymile.com. In return for his legwork, Carpenter's B&B receives a free banner ad on the route pages he researches. The ad encourages Web users to patronize his business should they decide to explore the attractions along the highway. Although Carpenter completed his first highway survey just five months ago, he says it's already paying off in more hits to his website and increased reservations. "I'm pleased with the number of page views I\'m getting," he says. "My website wasn't doing all that well before this."

Located on Ledge Road in Geauga County, Chamomile B&B is nestled between the vineyards and wineries of the north and Amish attractions of the south. The Carpenters purchased the five-bedroom house in 1985 and opened their B&B in 1994. Carpenter, who worked for Lubrizol before becoming a B&B owner, says the hospitality business has been extremely rewarding."We\'ve made a lot of friends through this," he says. "It's been a ball meeting a full range of people. In the eight year\s we had this, I can honestly say I've never had someone where I said 'I hope they never come back again.' "However, like everyone in the tourism industry, Chamomile was hard-hit by terrorism fears following 9-11. The month following the terrorist attacks, business at the Chamomile fell 100 percent. "October is our busiest month of the year, but that year we had zero," he says. "Last year it started to pick up. July, August and October were better months, it's getting back to normal." Thus, when the opportunity to get additional, free Web presence was offered to Carpenter by Tom and Jim Love, owners of milebymile.com, Carpenter decided to go for it. The investment was minimal, a day or so of legwork that would better acquaint him with the main highway near his business, Route 528.

Jim Love says they chose B&B owners to document North American highways because B&Bs tend to have wide distribution. "Along most every highway you will find a B&B," says Love, of Vancouver, British Columbia. "B&Bs also tend to know the local area quite well since they need to advise visitors of tourism opportunities. "Lastly, B&Bs tend to have good advertising on the internet, therefore they understand the benefit of added exposure. They were also easier than any other business to find on the internet since most B&Bs have a Web site now."

Carpenter chose a day in August to drive Route 528 from Madison on the Lake to Parkman, a distance of 54 miles including side trips. Carpenter said the trip was beneficial to his own business because it gave him a chance to meet other business owners along the route and network with them. Some of those acquaintances have developed into joint ventures that offer the B&B guests package deals with wineries and restaurants. In addition to posting information on attractions and businesses, milebymile.com hosts photographs. Carpenter said getting a good picture of the attractions was the most challenging aspect of being a steward. The steward logs onto a site with a password, enters the information and uploads the photographs. Web page addresses for the businesses and attractions can be included, giving them additional exposure. "The businesses I visited, they couldn't believe this is free," Carpenter says.

The site can be updated at any time and changes appear immediately. Jim Love says that although 200 people have signed up as stewards, only about 50 of them have actually completed highways. For every highway that the steward enters a report, his B&B gets another banner ad. One to spot a good deal, Carpenter followed up his report on Route 528 with four more: routes 534, 608, 531 and 307. He's been assigned Route 87 for the spring of 2003.

The number of hits to the site is impressive. Jim Love says the daily visitor rate averages 3,500; they expect 5,000 by summer. Milebymile.com launched a sister site, roadlodging.com, which should further help boost hits to the milebymile.com site, says Love. Love says the most frequently access highway page is California's U.S. 50, from Sacramento to the California/Nevada state line. It is reported by Chichester-McKee House B&B Inn in Placerville, Calif. The Route 528 page alone has had 29,000 page views since it went up in August. That's a lot of people looking at information about the wineries, museums, villages and retailers along the route.

"I'm proving to people all over the place that if they come here and stay there will be many things for them to do," Carpenter says. He estimates that the businesses listed on milebymile pages receive about $200 of free exposure every year. Carpenter is also enthusiastic about the service because it often places his B&B and the other attractions mentioned on the site in the top 10 search results when geographic names are entered. "I wouldn't be able to do that without having to pay someone a $1,000 a year," he says.

Jim Love says their 15 years of programming experience gives them the inside track on what key words to use in their pages to help Web surfers find all the attractions they are looking for. "A lot of times, the milebymile site will pop up before the business' own site," Carpenter says. The site requires minimal maintenance on the owners' part because the content is dynamically generated by the highway stewards. Love says that the site is not making money, but he believes that will change as a result of the synergy between it and roadlodging.com. "The largest income goal will be achieved in several years once we achieve a critical mass of information on www.milebymile.com," he says. "Consider this: What would a site with detailed tourism information on many or most highways in North America be worth? I can only speculate that the revenue opportunities would be substantial. Until then, we are enjoying meeting new people from across North America and finding out all sorts of information from far and wide. "Love suggests that individuals who are not B&B owners but would be interested in documenting a highway team up with someone who is already a steward. "It's been working out for us," Carpenter says. "I think it's going to work out even more so this year and in the coming year."