Bermuda's guest houses need to be marketed under a different name overseas because foreign visitors think they are down-market, Tourist Board chairman Delaey Robinson said this week.

Mr. Robinson, who owns Aunt Nea's Inn in St. George's, said Americans did not know what a guest house was, and Europeans associated the name with pensions, or cheap hotels.

He intends to find out at tourism marketing events in London, Manchester and Berlin in March if Europeans have the wrong perception of guest houses.

If, as expected, they have a down-market perception, Mr. Robinson plans to lobby the Island's smaller properties to push the Department of Tourism to market them under another name overseas.

Mr. Robinson told The Royal Gazette : "What is coming out is that when you use the word `guest house' in Europe they think of it like a pension, at the very low end of the market.

"What is overdue is for guest house owners in Bermuda to say once you say guest house you are already projecting yourself as something that doesn't fit in with the high-end reputation Bermuda is supposed to have.

"We need to drop it and the Tourism Ministry needs to drop it from the nomenclature.

"There is very much a need to tap into Europe so we can't afford to be shooting ourselves in the foot. But people are loathe to change things because they have been marketing this way for donkey's years.

"The research we did before marketing Aunt Nea's in North America found they had no idea what a guest house is. It isn't in their vocabulary.

"In the States they think a guest house is a room in your house for guests.

"By and large, guest houses do breakfast, and if we said bed and breakfast to the North American market that would be much more suitable. They know what B&B is, and they are top quality places.

"If we sold ourselves under that new banner, right away we would see more business. It's a job I'm going to have to do within Bermuda Hotel Association to get the smaller properties to re-examine and see if we don't want to review the nomenclature.

"I'll look at it closely in Europe before I jump on the bandwagon. Clearly in the US market this is the case but in the European market its beginning to seem we have the same situation.