Negotiating as a non-negotiator

This week we got some snow, so here's a picture of Eli playing out in it... his favorite thing to do is knock down ice cycles off the neighbors' cars. He also likes to simply walk on snow and see the designs his footprints make.

Here's my story about negotiating...

As I was going for a long jog this week I realized that Spring break was nearly upon us. I had completely forgotten—I’ve been pretty busy with work lately—so I hadn’t made any plans. Fortunately, because I have been working so hard, I will really have the entire week to take off.

There are two vacation-type things we’ve wanted to do for some time now. Ever since we were married nearly five years ago we’ve wanted to stay in a fancy shmancy Bed & Breakfast. Money has always been tight so we’ve never made the splurge. The second thing we’ve wanted to do (since moving to Indiana) is to visit Amish Country, whether that be here in state or in Ohio or Pennsylvania.

Anyhow, while on my jog I decided it would finally be time to do these two things and started making tentative plans. I remembered reading in Richard Paul Evans’ “Five Things a Millionaire Taught Me” that when making a major purchase you should always ask “is that the best you can do?” I decided to implement this tactic in getting a better deal on a B&B in Amish Country. The problem is that I really don’t like negotiating, and I have a fear of phones. I do, however, believe in research so when I got home I looked up all of the Bed and Breakfasts in Northern Indiana. I then narrowed my search to all those that had big rooms (so we could partition off the kids) and a Jacuzzi tub. I came up with three and send each of them an email explaining that we were interested in coming up for a couple of days so what kind of a deal could we get and could they accommodate children (the websites weren’t very clear on this second point).

I got a near immediate response from one of them saying they would let the children stay for free and they would knock $40-60 off their regular rate and get us a room for $99/night. That sounded pretty good to me but I wondered why they were so anxious to sign us up so I checked the booking for each of the three B&Bs and saw that almost all rooms were available for next week. Apparently this is the very off-season time of year for Amish Bed & Breakfasts. So I didn’t book with the first but waited to hear from the others. The next day a 2^nd B&B emailed and said they would let the kids stay free (normally $25/child/night) and recommended we call and they would give us a good deal. We didn’t call but they really wanted our business and the next day emailed offering buy one night get one night free. At this point we were sold and Natalie called them.

We ended up getting their biggest fanciest room for $220 for the two nights. During the regular season this same scenario would have cost us just under $500. Pretty good deal, especially since we didn’t really haggle or negotiate at all, we simply let them outbid each other.