Business is bad? Let's blame someone else!

(Subtitle: rearranging the deck chairs at Kiwi Café)


As I have noted here before, "The tourist season in St. Martin and St. Maarten starts after Halloween, and ends with the Easter weekend. Apart from a handful of French visitors in July and August, the island tends to quiet down rather dramatically in Summer." This past Saturday around dinner time, my friend Sebastiaan from Sopranos restaurant and I did a bit of competitive analysis while driving from the Sonesta Maho Beach resort to Marty's Gyro in Simpson Bay.

While passing Fu2ion, Cheri's Café, Paris Bistro, Crazy Thyme, Rancho, The Palms, Kiwi Café, Terra Sana, Aldywan, Bonita's Cantina, the Fish Market, Pizza Galley, Halsey's, Lee's, Cajun Queen, Skip Jack's, The Wharf, The Boathouse, Topper's and Mooi we glimpsed into each restaurant and looked at deserted patios and mostly empty tables inside. Only three of the twenty restaurants had some visible business. In Maho, Cheri's Café looked semi-busy: their show was in full swing. Further down the Simpson Bay strip only Aldywan and Topper's seemed to be having a reasonable night. We stopped at Marty's Gyro and found ourselves to be just about the only guests, with the exception of some friends of the owner and his staff.

Now, Saturdays are often considered among the weaker days during St. Maarten's high season. But once the tourists leave, local residents usually enjoy a bit of downtime and schedule their dinner plans around the weekends. It, of course, requires them having had a decent season and being left with some money to spend... From the looks of it, I doubt that's the case. I'm betting that this upcoming Summer will not be an easy one. According to rumor, some fifty restaurants are now openly for sale on the Dutch side alone.

Presumably, quite a few restaurants are having a tough time to stay open. Today, I was somewhat surprised to receive a message from the owner of a small restaurant that opened late last year. I gather there must have been some pent-up frustration at play when Facebook sent them an automated friend request reminder...

Early in the year, I noticed that they had created a "Fan Page" for their restaurant. Since I had met them during their opening night and had told them briefly about DineSXM and the services that we provide to local restaurants, I decided at that time to befriend them on Facebook as well. Honestly, I must say that the meeting had left me with a less than optimal feeling about the restaurant's success potential - and I didn't really believe that a full DineSXM listing for Kiwi Café would be appropriate yet at that time.

I guess that in writing the free mini-listing on DineSXM for this restaurant, some of my skepticism must have permeated through. Still, by enlarge, my description of Kiwi Café was rather positive -even if perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek. My sense of humor must not have translated well, because I quickly received a rather nasty request to delete parts of the description that apparently were not well received by the restaurant's owners. It seems that Facebook ate my earlier communication with them, but I'll look for it again later - you all deserve some juicy quotes from the original missive. Naturally, the DineSXM page in question remained unchanged.

Today, upon receiving the strange rant above, I felt compelled to re-iterate some of our policies and give the sender a honest, but still most politely expressed, piece of my mind:

XXXXX, I believe you're barking up the wrong tree. 

First of all, you're getting free exposure through a mini-listing, including your phone, address and map location. Please let me know if anything in that section is incorrect. 

Obviously, we reserve our rights to our website content, including full editorial control over said content. Although we're always open for polite and friendly suggestions on how to improve the site, only restaurants that we have a contractual agreement with can have a say over what appears in their description. 

You also seem confused about Facebook's automated feature to remind you of 'friend' requests. I suggest that you familiarize yourself a bit more with its functionality.

While it's not my place to lecture you on how to run your business (and viceversa), I would like to suggest that you re-evaluate your attitude towards our service. You may have noticed on our FB fan page that we often rebroadcast promotional messages from restaurants - even those that are not affiliated :) Naturally, that selection is influenced by how their owners interact with us. 

DineSXM is growing at record speed, and we're close to becoming ubiquitous as a destination and dining information + booking resource. I hope this explains to you why I do not have much time to spend on individual restaurant owners who do fail to grasp the opportunity. Below, I am attaching the latest example of how participating restaurants benefit from being featured on our site. It's just much more productive to focus on growing the numbers of eyeballs that visit DineSXM every day and to maximize the value that we can provide to those who wish to work with us...

I concluded the message by attaching a link to the Sonesta Resorts website - the Sonesta Maho Beach Resort  has put together a special offer that includes discounts on dinner at several Maho area restaurants. Many of these restaurants take online reservations through our website, and I was thrilled to see that the page includes links to the restaurants' DineSXM profiles.

Meanwhile, traffic is way up: +45% in terms of visits in the past 19 weeks compared to the same period in 2009 and a whopping 85% growth for our restaurant pages (again first 19 weeks of 2010 vs 2009). And, ehm... Nobody seems to care much about the restaurant in question. It appears as the 61st most viewed profile, with just over 200 page views. Sorry guys!