In October of 2014, fishlodges.com was born over a lunch of pulled pork sandwiches and fries. The idea at least—it would be couple months before my partner and I had a first prototype website. The problem however, was clear in our minds. It was a dual-pronged problem that affected two groups of people…and in solving this problem we would bring these two groups together by solving both their problems.
On one hand there were people just like us who loved fishing, were short on time (things like jobs and family were the things that most often kept us off the water) but were often looking for a great new place to catch our next 6 months of salmon or halibut. When I decided to book a vacation for my father’s 70th birthday a few years back, the problem really came to light—searching on google for the usual assortment of keywords—salmon, halibut, fishing, lodge, BC, Alaska, best (etc.)—I would find hundreds of results. None of them had impartial ratings or reviews. Which one should I choose? After combing through the first dozen websites I concluded that they all seemed pretty much the same, yet I had a hard time finding the information I was really after (I specifically wanted a place that had modern, comfortable boats with heated cabins and a head on-board). Almost all websites looked terrible on my iPhone (preventing me from conducting my search on the can…sorry, too much info!) Worse still, I had been at it for a week already and had spent probably 6 hours searching! “There has to be a better way” methinks.
Fast forward a few years later to our pulled pork sandwich lunch. My partner tells me about a buddy of his who was interviewing for a sales job at fishing lodges in Alaska. He described how impressed he was by the marketing budgets of these lodges. Yellow pages ads, website costs, magazine ads, and worst of all the expenses (and exhaustion) from multi-day trips doing the spring tradeshow circuit. Yet, often, boats remain unfilled (remember, there are hundreds of other lodges all doing the same—a very competitive market).
To solve both problems, we envisioned a website that consolidates the important data from all the individual sportfishing vacation websites in one place, allowing time-starved people like me to quickly filter only those lodges that meet the criteria they’re truly interested in (like location, price, type of fishing, rating…and boat features!). For lodge owners, we would provide an alternative to traditional (and costly and not measurable) yellow pages advertising and expensive trade shows. We provide the ability for lodge owners to have a great-looking, mobile-friendly website. Best of all, we would provide this digital marketing option to lodges at zero risk—making any payment to us contingent upon collecting full payment from the customer first. Of course the website would be free for customers, and fishing packages would be the same price as offered by the lodge directly (the lodge would not need to increase their prices to pay us—they would simply divert a portion of their marketing budget).
Over a year later, and fishlodges.com has been built, tested and is open for business. We have launched with our first 33 lodges (with an initial focus on the Pacific Northwest—British Columbia, Alaska, Yukon and Oregon) and more will be added regularly. If you’re a fishing lodge owner, check out our low-risk plans for getting your lodge listed.
