Boulder-based BudandBreakfast.com helps tourists find pot-friendly lodging

BOULDER — So you’ve made your pot pilgrimage to Colorado, visited your first dispensary and bought a vacation’s-worth of bud only to have this buzzkill set in: You can’t smoke it in public, and that hotel you booked online has a no-smoking policy.

Fret not. A new Boulder company is aiming to help you solve that cannabis conundrum while you’re planning your trip.

Billing itself as the AirBNB for cannabis-friendly lodging, Bud and Breakfast launched last month, providing travelers with private and legal places to smoke in the growing number of destinations around the world where the drug has been legalized.

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Credit founder and chief executive Sean Roby with some foresight. With his family already in the travel industry – offering winery tours, sustainable-agriculture education, farm-to-table experiences and vacation-home rentals in places such as California, Hawaii and New Zealand – Roby bought the BudandBreakfast.com domain name in 2001, well before Colorado became the first state to legalize recreational marijuana.

“I thought, ‘One day, (the business) is going to be cannabis,’ ” Roby, 40, said in a recent interview.

A month in, Bud and Breakfast has about 100 accommodation listings on its site – mostly for bed and breakfasts and private vacation rentals – hailing from Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Hawaii, California, Jamaica, Uruguay, Holland, Mexico, Argentina and Canada. Their pot friendliness ranges from those allowing smoking in outdoor areas only to all-inclusive packages where guests wake up and have eggs, bacon and a bowl waiting for them at the breakfast table.

The site launched April 1 with a ramp-up to 420 festivities in Denver on April 20, and business was booming from the start, with travelers looking to celebrate in Denver booking accommodations in Boulder, Colorado Springs and Vail.

“We were just inundated,” Roby said. “We didn’t have enough accommodations unfortunately. Denver was sold out completely.”

Similar to the AirBNB model, Bud and Breakfast collects a 3 percent booking fee from the lodging owners and an 8 percent fee from travelers on each transaction.

So what’s to stop AirBNB or another established company from adding a marijuana-friendly search filter on their sites? AirBNB officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Dan Connolly – a professor in the University of Denver’s hospitality program, senior associate dean of the business school there, and a hospitality industry analyst for Phocuswright – said adding such a filter certainly would be easy enough for AirBNB and would make a company with that kind of traction in the global marketplace a formidable competitor for Bud and Breakfast. But he also speculates that doing so might not mesh with the image AirBNB is going for, or it could simply be too much of a niche market for a company of AirBNB’s stature to go after.

The value of targeting that niche is something other similar companies have weighed.

HomeAway is the parent company of several vacation rental websites, including HomeAway.com, BedandBreakfast.com, and VRBO.com. The company has multiple property owners who market their accommodations as marijuana-friendly on HomeAway’s various sites.

Carl Shepherd, cofounder and chief development officer of the company, said in an emailed statement that one of the advantages of renting a vacation home is the ability for travelers to make it feel like their own, provided they follow the owner’s rules. He said HomeAway “has no problem with an owner who is comfortable allowing marijuana to take advantage of the situation where its use is legal.” But Shepherd said the marijuana-friendly market also isn’t one his company is actively pursuing.

“Overall, though there is likely demand for marijuana-friendly accommodations, HomeAway will remain focused and committed to growing the vacation-rental category as a whole,” Shepherd said. “Less than 50 percent of travelers even consider staying in a vacation rental, so we have a lot of work to do before we can target niche travel.”

Roby said the niche is precisely where he believes his company has the advantage, with many of the owners listing on his site serving as de facto local experts on their areas’ best dispensaries, restaurants and other attractions that might be of note for travelers in town for the cannabis scene. He said an aim of Bud and Breakfast – an offshoot of his previous company, Taste of Travel – is to begin at some point also offering “foodie tours” to restaurants that infuse cannabis into their food or simply play off the cannabis theme in naming menu items.

“We are specifically cannabis,” Roby said. “That’s what we do. We provide the whole experience. Air BNB’s the big kahuna. Why would they need to delve into a gray area? … It seems unlikely.”

The gray area of marijuana legalization in the United States, where the drug still is technically illegal at the federal level despite state-by-state approval, also plays into Bud and Breakfast being protected from hotels dominating the space. Only one lists on Bud and Breakfast: The First Inn of Pagosa Springs.

Owner Lou Woodard began listing The First Inn on Bud and Breakfast when the site launched. But he’s been marketing his hotel as cannabis-friendly since July, with pictures of his marquee declaring the hotel “420 friendly” getting shared all over social media.

Woodard said he doesn’t know yet how many of his bookings have come from Bud and Breakfast specifically, but he said the majority of the guests at his 33-room hotel these days are looking for cannabis-friendly accommodations.

“It just seemed like the smart thing to do, and it has paid off,” Woodard said.

But The First Inn will likely remain in the minority.

Connolly, the DU professor, said the vast majority of hotel chains have banned smoking of any type completely because that’s what the market has demanded. He said hotels have to think about the health issues of second-hand smoke, the odor and high cleaning fees. Image also is a big issue for many chains that try to portray themselves as family friendly. Connolly added that, given the patchwork of marijuana laws around the country, hotels could open themselves up to liability risks if they market themselves as cannabis-friendly and someone is hurt on their property.

“I’m not sure you would see a major hotel company embracing this unless it’s with a specific niche brand that they create,” Connolly said. “You’re dealing with a lot of unknowns at this point.”

Roby tries not to wade too far into the gray areas himself.

Bud and Breakfast steers clear of selling marijuana, and Roby said so far he has marketed only to lodging owners in states and countries where recreational marijuana use is legal, although property owners in states where medical marijuana is legal have reached out to Bud and Breakfast. If owners in states where only medical use is legal, such as California, list their property, Roby said the onus is on them to know their local laws and whether they have to do anything special such as examine guests’ medical marijuana cards before allowing them to smoke onsite.

So far, the only states to legalize recreational use are Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska, as well as the District of Columbia. But at least that many more could have legalization measures on the ballot next year, giving Roby hope that his target market is primed for growth.

Roby, who runs the business virtually out of his Boulder home for now, launched Bud and Breakfast with his wife and family members, and has so far bootstrapped the company with less than $50,000. While he’s been reluctant to bring on outside investors, he acknowledges that the company might be getting to the point where it needs to do so soon.

Bud and Breakfast has a mix of about 10 employees and contractors working on the venture now, but Roby expects that number to grow.

“We’re going to be definitely expanding our PR and marketing,” Roby said. “If a state or country goes legal, we’re going to have people on the ground.”

Joshua Lindenstein can be reached at 303-630-1943, 970-416-7343 or jlindenstein@bizwestmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @joshlindenstein