Working on our time off

A few of our friends get quite a number of their listings from VRBO so following their lead, we set up our own page on their site. Of course you can see photos and prices there, and all the typical stuff that you can find on our real website. One thing that you can see on the VRBO site though is a calendar that shows our bookings. We’ve also had guests post a couple of great reviews on that site and I expect that we’ll have a few more posted in the near future. Please check our VRBO page and let me know what you think. Even better, forward the link to your friends!

On a related topic, I heard a rumor from some friends that a few charter brokers may be a tad “intimidated” by our efforts to self-promote. If that is really the truth, it’s pretty silly in my opinion. Their fear, of course, is that after investing time in promoting our boat to a client of theirs that the client will contact us directly and we’ll book them ourselves, cutting the broker out of the loop and thus robbing them of their commission. That would be extremely stupid for us to do that, wouldn’t it? We actually built a completely separate website just for brokers. It contains no contact info or pricing so they can freely share it with their clients.

Just recently we had a potential guest contact us directly from our Facebook page. He told us that he had been working with a broker but that she did not mention our boat at all*. In spite of that, we still kept her in the equation! After confirming that we were available for the dates that he wanted, we told him to still book the charter through his broker. Hopefully these rumors are not true and if they are, they’re limited to a very small percentage of brokers because I have no plans to stop promoting ourselves!

• We later found out that this was not actually the case but rather, the broker had presented so many boats that ours kind of slipped through the cracks. Imagine that? 🙂

In spite of all that I wrote above, we haven’t been working non-stop…

We even had some guests visit us…