International Award Winning B&B
It’s unlikely that it’s escaped your notice all the awards The 25 Boutique B&B has won!
If you haven’t seen our social media updates or our newsletter, you may have seen us on the news or in a newspaper or a magazine or on line on all sorts of websites. We’ve been everywhere in the last few years!
Following on from our local and regional success in various awards, we've won national and international TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice awards too as well as another couple of major national awards.
We attended the Visit England Awards for Excellence where we were awarded Best B&B in England by Kirstie Allsopp of Location, Location, Location fame. The AA B&B Awards ceremony at the five star Landmark Hotel crowned The 25 as Unique B&B of the Year for Great Britain.
We’re really getting our name out there as a high quality place to stay. And all these awards add weight to my B&B training course – if you’re going to attend a course then you may as well learn from someone with an excellent reputation and proven track record. I was interviewed by Waitrose Magazine and national newspapers in respect to my course.
It was also interesting that both The AA and Visit England have commented that we’ve had an effect on the local area, helping others realise the need for high quality accommodation, offering a luxury B&B stay. Guests are prepared to pay a little more to get a lot more.
If you’d like to see all the awards we’ve won, you can go to:
The way awards work vary enormously. In the case of TripAdvisor it’s purely down to all our lovely guests continuing to pop new reviews on their site. Others, like local regional awards such as Visit Devon where we won Gold for Best B&B, we initially apply and fill in a lengthy application form fulfilling certain criteria, then if we’re deemed good enough, we get a mystery overnight inspection, before being put through to a judging panel who decide the winners.
With the AA awards, several inspectors over the years have visited us, and then put us forward to their judging panel who whittle down the nominations.
Invariably, judges will also look at your social media feeds, the quality of your website and ease of the booking process, test you over the phone and with email contacts, read your reviews, your Access Statement and Environmental Policy. It’s a great deal more detailed and thorough than you might think but I suppose a professional tourism body don’t want to crown someone a winner then find out they have a poor reputation in one area and don’t deserve the award or it should have gone to someone better. They also need to be able to prove their system of judging is fair and open.
I'd like to say I'm off to continue celebrating now but instead in this glamorous B&B lifestyle I lead, I need to go and make some more of my homemade granola for breakfast, along with another batch of my famous chocolate brownies.
Want to win awards yourself? Want to know our secrets of success? Join Andy on the his B&B Training Course.
