What is the difference between a B&B (bed and breakfast) establishment and your usual hotels or motels? A B&B or bed and breakfast only offers guests one bedroom or two bedrooms in the entire house (usually private residences that have extra bedrooms that outsiders can use for a fee) for one night and only one meal (usually breakfast) served – hence they are called bed and breakfasts or B&B inns. The concept of a B&B is common in the US, Canada, the UK and even Australia. Hotels and motels usually have a lot of guest rooms and offer more amenities and services than just one breakfast per guest.
Since many Tucson bed and breakfast places are actually private homes with extra bedrooms to use as guest rooms, you might have to share a bathroom with the other guests in that place. You might also have to wake up at a specific time to be able to share a meal in the house kitchen, dining room or breakfast nook with the other house guests. The appeal of Tucson bed and breakfast inns is that they are homey, cozy, and may be more personable types of lodging services than the more professional and clinically run hotels and motels.
In Arizona, Tucson bed and breakfast inns are more organized and may be part of the Arizona Association of Bed and Breakfast Inns. A bed and breakfast in Tucson will probably attract Tucson visitors who like to be in more private accommodations without a lot of strangers flocking around them. But the more highly capitalized Tucson bed and breakfast establishments may have quite a lot of guest rooms, so that you wonder if they are strictly bed and breakfast inns or actually hotels and motels. These bigger businesses offering bed and breakfast in Tucson may have additional services and amenities too, such as patios, private bathrooms per guest room, Jacuzzis, a private gym, telescopes for looking around at the scenery and the stars at night, and fountains in courtyards where guests can hang around in the morning or afternoon to while away the time. When your Tucson bed and breakfast has this many things going for it, it might make you wonder why anyone would stay in a noisy crowded motel or hotel in the first place.
The smaller bed and breakfast in Tucson may be manned simply by the owners of the house and their domestic help (if any) while the bigger bed and breakfast in Tucson would probably have more staff on hand as hired employees. The smaller Tucson bed and breakfast inns probably run more to bring in a secondary source of income for the house owners than because they want to compete with more commercial establishments. The bigger establishments, since they probably used more money as capitalization to be set up, probably run more along profit-oriented lines. But whichever type you like, the important aspects stay the same: you want a room for the night that is clean, well-maintained with clean sheets and pillowcases plus a breakfast in the morning that is filling and nourishing at the same time. A good bed and breakfast inn will probably get repeat guests year after year if so.