St. Maarten / St. Martin restaurant news

Comments restricted

2010-08-08T13:29:00.000-04:00

Thanks to some clueless people, comments have temporarily been restricted. Since Google is doing a horrible job at keeping the spammers at bay, this blog will be moving to the DineSXM server shortly.

Posts will resume as soon as the move is completed.

Norbert - DineSXM.com

"Dinner on the House" Giveaway

2010-07-22T18:40:00.000-04:00

DineSXM's Dinner Voucher Giveaway

Here's a little reminder, in case you've missed the original announcement: ten St. Maarten restaurants have recently teamed up with DineSXM for our Summer Giveaway.

Each week until November, visitors of the SXM restaurant reservations and dining guide can participate in our online giveaway and win a "Dinner on the House" courtesy of a local St. Maarten restaurant.

To enter in the giveaway and get a chance to win one of the twenty $50 dinner vouchers, all you have to do is to make a booking online during the promotional period at one of the following island restaurants: Bavaria, Rare, Sopranos, Uncle Harry's Topper's, Rancho, Temptation, Topper's by the Sea, Terra Sana and Tequila.

More information about the participating restaurants and the promotion is available on the DineSXM.com website.

Restaurant Map for St. Maarten and St. Martin

2010-05-25T15:24:00.007-04:00

(Subtitle: when it takes a friend to nudge you in the right direction...)

Et Voila! After almost 2 1/2 years of thinking about creating an embeddable map of all St. Maarten and St. Martin restaurants that we feature on the DineSXM website, here it is....

Your browser does not support iframes.

It took all of 45 minutes to convert the interactive St. Maarten restaurant map from our website into its own page. It contains nearly 125 places to eat on our island: click on any of the markers to open a balloon with a description of the restaurant's specialties and cuisine, as well as its contact information. A BIG THANK YOU goes out to Victoria from SXM Privilege for the wake up call :)

Feel free to embed the map on your website, blog, iGoogle, or what have you!

Paste this code to your site and embed the St. Martin / St. Maarten restaurant map:


<div style="height: 600px; margin: 10px auto; overflow: hidden; width: 600px;">
<iframe height="800px" src="http://www.dinesxm.com/sxm-restaurant-map" style="left: -160px; position: relative; top: -100px;" title="The DineSXM restaurant map" width="800px">Your browser does not support iframes.</iframe></div>

Without the containing <div> you can simply use this code to create an 800x800 pixel interactive dining map:


<iframe height="800px" width="800px" src="http://www.dinesxm.com/sxm-restaurant-map" title="The DineSXM restaurant map">Your browser does not support iframes.</iframe>

If you want to bookmark the map, just follow this link: http://www.dinesxm.com/sxm-restaurant-map and press CTRL-D

In case you run into problems, post your questions below and I'll try to help!

Edit, thanks Paul @ http://www.stmaartenisland.com/ If you're concerned about the DineSXM site opening in the same window, ~~just add this line before the final </div> - the dimensions should be equal to the size of your first div element (in this case 600x600 pixels).~~ Update June 8: this is now fixed, the map balloons will now open in a new window by default.

Cover the iframe with a div element to open the map in a new window:
<div onclick="window.open('http://www.dinesxm.com/sxm-restaurant-map', '_blank', 'width=800, height=800'); return false;" style="position:absolute; height:600px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;cursor:pointer;"></div>

Business is bad? Let's blame someone else!

2010-05-18T20:46:00.005-04:00

(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!

Good Times at L'Estaminet

2010-02-24T03:47:00.004-04:00

Updated 3/15, see below

From the looks of it, the ladies at L'Estaminet restaurant in Grand Case had someone build a new website for their upscale eatery. But, rather than spending money on something that is proven to work: a profile on DineSXM, they decided to go the amateur route.

Here is a little screenshot of the L'Estaminet SXM website, it very much looks like it's still a work in progress...

Note how there is no navigation, no information, no... anything! In other words, a rather useless attempt at designing a restaurant website. Putting it live before any content is visible actually harms the owners of the restaurant because it tells visitors that L'Estaminet doesn't have its act together yet. Meanwhile, their FREE DineSXM profile is dishing out all kinds of information about their place: address and phone number (of course), types of cuisine, restaurant description, images and even an interactive map to guide potential visitors straight to the restaurant. All that's missing is the ability to make online reservations...

But wait, there's more! It gets more fun. Good times to be had by (almost) all...

Instead of finishing the site before putting it online for the world to see, "somebody" decided to Googlebomb the keyword "L'Estaminet SXM" - no, really... As of January 18th, we've started seeing single page hits (bounces) for that particular keyword. Search engines are known to potentially interpret a bounce (when a visitor quickly leaves the page they followed after a search query) as a negative quality signal. These kinds of signals may sometimes lead to the page in question being ranked lower than normal for a specific query.

The funny thing is that the particular keyphrase "L'Estaminet SXM" is generating so many more visits than other phrases (normal ratio of visits per unique phrase is about 1.2) - which means that it became obvious really quick that someone is trying to mess with our position for that keyword. Other keywords related to the restaurant have a much lower bounce rate, and so there's another clear giveaway that the bounces are artificial.

Here's a little hint for anyone who would like to use blackhat tactics to bring DineSXM down a notch in the future: please use a bunch of proxies instead of your Caribserve / New Technologies, St. Maarten based ISP. This part makes you look REALLY stupid!

In any case, there are many restaurants in Grand Case that are worth a visit. This type of sneaky behavior makes it less likely that L'Estaminet will ever be one of them as far as we are concerned...

Update 3/15/2010

Whoops! That last two paragraphs came out a bit harsh. Not very professional of me, sorry! I'm blaming the late hour that I wrote original post at, and a bit of frustration considering that L'Estaminet would be a prime candidate for a successful profile on DineSXM. In more than two years of running the St. Maarten / St. Martin dining guide and reservations website, I have become pretty good at judging what types of restaurants would benefit the most from a prominent listing and letting their guests book online. L'Estaminet would most likely be among the top 5 or at least top 10 in terms of performance...

I also noticed that the phantom hits have now stopped again. Thanks, whoever you are, much appreciated! Here's a comparison between visits that came from regular searches for the restaurant and the mysterious bouncing traffic - just to illustrate how badly those phantom visits stuck out from the norm...

DineSXM Info for Restaurant Owners

2010-02-07T12:53:00.004-04:00

Today, we're happy to release our very first DineSXM Media Kit, which includes pretty much everything a restaurant owner or manager on St. Maarten / St. Martin should know about joining our popular restaurant reservations and dining guide.

This information package consists of a mere five slides. In no more than one-and-a-half minute you'll be able to find out all important benefits of listing your restaurant on the DineSXM website.

For a preview, you can follow this link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=146099&id=56931942762. And, why not also take this opportunity to join our Facebook fan page while you're at it. You'll be in good company: more than 500 Facebook users are fans of DineSXM.

DineSXM is the best viewed dining website on SXM, and the only one which offers confirmed table bookings through its integrated seat reservation database. Over 100 restaurant profiles can now be found on this site, and many of those can already be booked online. Some of the most popular places to eat that offer online booking capability include: Temptation, Captain Oliver's, Peg Leg Pub, Sopranos, and the recently reopened 3palms Resto-Lounge. Some of the best hidden gems include Fusion, Halsey's and Tides at Mary's Boon Beach Plantation.

We're growing like crazy, and have just surpassed 20,000 monthly pageviews. This month marks our 2 year anniversary, and we'd like restaurants to celebrate their success together with ours! That's why, for a limited time only, we're waiving all signup fees... Just pay the low annual fee and get a year's worth of targeted exposure for as little as $450 - that's less than the price of a small newspaper ad!

To find out more, download the full PDF media kit here: low-res for viewing online (358Kb) or high resolution (1,2Mb) to print out and show to the boss...

Thanks Larry!

2010-01-18T21:47:00.005-04:00

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm named after Larry Page. Google uses this algorithm as one of many factors to score documents (rank nodes) in the linked database that we all call World Wide Web. It was developed by Google's founders Larry and Sergey while they were students at Stanford University in the late 90's.

Rumor has it that "true" PageRank is calculated continuously for each single page on the web, and to an almost infinite precision. The exact number is used internally by the search engine and, neither the value or its calculation method are ever disclosed publicly. Toolbar PageRank (TBPR), in contrast, is represented as an integer between 0 and 10 on a logarithmic scale. This number is visible through Google's toolbar as users navigate to any individual page, and seen to be updated every few months.

Experienced webmasters generally take this number with a grain of salt. They understand that the visible number is just a snapshot of a particular point in time, and only a very crude benchmark of a page's ranking power. And of course, this is only one of the 100 or so factors that the search engine supposedly considers when it ranks a page for any particular query. Take a look at WikiPedia's article on PageRank for some more in-depth information on the topic.

For most websites, their home page will usually show as the document with the highest toolbar rank. It is not uncommon to hear webmasters talk along the lines of "I have a PR7 website" - usually for bragging rights or when engaged in a pissing contest - when they actually mean that their page with the highest TBPR has a value of 7.

A high TBPR can certainly be an ego boost, and possibly give off a general signal about that page's overall performance. So, obviously we were stoked when the DineMonkey homepage attained TBPR 5 on Oct 19 2008, and the DineSXM.com homepage jumped to 5 on Jan 2, 2009 within a year of its launch. But surprisingly, the blog that you are now reading never managed to get anywhere in nearly two years of existence. Well, finally today this has changed: dinesxm.blogspot.com is our third website related to making restaurant reservations online to receive a TBPR of five. So, yay for us! :)

Thank you, Mr. Page and all Googlers, for recognizing the value of our contributions to the web. We'll be sure to put our newly acquired bragging rights to good use!

All kidding aside: we actually do make a serious effort to provide valuable information and tools, through DineSXM, DineMonkey and this blog, that make it easy for guests to book their favorite restaurants. We also try very hard to do the same for webmasters who want to build local destination guides that let their visitors make online table reservations... Let us help: we're always looking to improve and grow new markets - get in touch if you like our style!

- Norbert, Chief Chimp at DineMonkey

One website: 100 island restaurants - See it, like it and book it!

2009-12-24T15:24:00.004-04:00

Our recent press release was published today in "The Daily Herald" - St. Maarten's local newspaper.

One website, 100 island restaurants - DineSXM.com - See it, like it and book it!

Just in time for the Holidays, the DineSXM table reservation service and online dining guide is celebrating the addition of its 100th restaurant profile to their website. Launched in early 2008, and now in its second full season, it is the only place on St. Maarten and St. Martin that lets visitors make a confirmed online table booking ahead of their visit to the island.

Besides offering some of the most comprehensive restaurant descriptions, the site lets registered visitors voice their opinion on places that they have recently dined at. A five-point scale is used to rate the food quality, degree of service, ambiance and decor, value for money, and whether the guest would recommend the establishment to their friends.

"Every day, hundreds of people count on DineSXM to find reliable and up to date information before deciding which restaurant they will visit" - says Norbert Marrale, one of DineSXM's founders. Explaining how visitors use the site to make their online booking, he notes: "It literally takes less than 10 seconds to book a table. This is a very helpful and much liked feature, since the process is hassle-free and saves both the guest and the restaurant owner a lot of time."

Behind the scenes, the website uses its DineMonkey booking software to make sure that a table is indeed available for the guest's party at their chosen date and time. In case the restaurant is already booked, the software will offer alternate times that are still available. The booking process itself is almost fully automated, including the sending of notifications and reminders. Restaurant owners and guests can always log in to DineSXM to check their pending reservations and update their statuses as needed.

Until this summer, DineSXM.com simply provided profiles of restaurants that could be booked online through its service. Now, based on feedback from its visitors, the site has been upgraded to allow all restaurants on the island to be listed for free. Those free "mini listings" are created as an extra service and help visitors to find basic information about each establishment.

Marrale, a former executive director at SHTA, is very familiar of the ins and outs of our island's hospitality sector. Aware of the fact that restaurants across the island are going through some really tough times, he points out that business owners should use such free listings as a stepping stone to grow their presence. Offering full profiles for just $450 a year, DineSXM is helping its affiliated establishments to become more visible on the Internet at a very reasonable price. The service also includes various forms of additional free promotion, such as regular "tweets" about island restaurants, a blog that highlights special events, and a very successful Facebook "fan" page that has grown to more than 400 followers in just four months. The site is expected to dish up 20,000 restaurant profiles a month between now and the end of the season. "Our numbers speak for themselves" says the confident DineSXM webmaster.

For the future, plans include enabling hotels and tour operators to make group bookings online, and the addition of restaurant videos and full menus that can be downloaded. DineSXM is also preparing for the upcoming launch of its affiliate booking engine, a feature that lets visitors of other St. Maarten and St. Martin travel websites make a confirmed booking while using the company's DineMonkey booking platform.

Happy holidays from the DineSXM team!

What to do with "trophy" keywords?

2009-12-17T19:35:00.011-04:00

It looks like we got an early Holiday gift from Google. DineSXM ranks #6 for Restaurant Reservations again...

As I was glossing over our semi-weekly keyword position report last night, I noticed that one of the "trophy terms" that we monitor had jumped back into view. Trophy terms consist of keyword combinations that are on-topic (e.g. variations of Restaurants, Booking, Reservation, St. Maarten, etc), but miss the specificity required to have any practical value.

Since DineSXM has a limited local and topical focus: we profile only restaurants that are located on the Dutch and French side of St. Maarten, there's little use in ranking well for terms that don't include both types of qualifiers / criteria.

Imagine a potential visitor who wishes to explore what our island has to offer. He or she types in "st martin" in their favorite search engine and receives results that might include St. Martin's Press, Saint Martin's College of Art and Design, St. Martin in the Fields, St. Martin Parish, etc...

Drat, those are not the results they were looking for, so here goes the next query: "st martins island." Lo and behold, the search engine returns webpages with information about the island of St. Maarten / St. Martin in the Caribbean, but among the results there's also St. Martins Island - a coral island located off the coast of Bangladesh. The searcher might find a news article, a page discussing the weather, flight information, a resort or marina, a school, a festival, and so on... Still quite random, really.

In a way, the search engine is still "guessing" what the person behind the keyboard is looking for... Much like in this video, the search engine is "cheap and keen to learn" - but in order for it to do what you want it to, you must speak to it in a "strange dialect" rather than natural language and give it very clear and specific directions:

As stated before, the "money" keywords for DineSXM must be on-topic and will most often also include a location criterion. Some time ago, one of our colleagues (whose keywords we also monitor to some extent) dropped out of the results for the term SXM. He maintains a more generic website about the island than us and, like a good neighbor, I decided to give him a heads-up about the loss. He replied with something along the lines of "thanks for the warning, but it's not a big deal: people who search for that term often don't know what they want yet."

In his situation I would probably have built a general island introduction page as soon as I noticed that the term was providing a source of traffic. Visitors who come in through a generic keyword could still be funneled through to any of the individual topics that are covered on the site (or even elsewhere). Unfortunately we're normally not ranking for St. Maarten, St. Martin, SXM or similar terms unless they're accompanied by an extra qualifier. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise :)

However, DineSXM ranks extremely well (especially considering its narrow local focus) for terms like Dining Reservations and Restaurant Reservations. Huh, say whaaat? No, seriously, here's the graph for Restaurant Reservations:

"Please smack me, to make sure I'm not dreaming!" Realistically, I don't think DineSXM ought to belong in the top 10 for this term. Top 50 perhaps... For starters, I'd expect this query to yield localized results. But apparently, Google thinks otherwise - or guesses correctly that the search was not made by a 'real' user... In our case, the queries have initially been made from DigitalPoint's server, and from our own box ever since the SOAP API was discontinued.

Since about a week ago, there's also the possibility that results are being "personalized" - enough discussion about this elsewhere. Maybe, just maybe, the case is that once Google receives a number of related queries, it includes prior searches in the way it determines the order of results...

In plain English: if our server (fixed ip address) first fires off a bunch of queries about St Maarten Restaurants, St Martin Dining and SXM Reservations, and then continues to query Google about Dining Reservations and Restaurant Reservations, is there a chance that the latter results have now become affected by the searches made just before? My guess, for now, is that the chance exists. Its implication in that situation, is that I should be on the lookout for a reporting tool that makes its queries through a distributed network of clients.

"Switch and spurs, switch and spurs; or I'll cry a match." Hmm, let's conveniently disregard the picture painted in the previous two paragraphs and pretend that we receive clean results. Who am I to question the omniscient Google? Follow me instead on what might either become a wild goose chase, or end up in a scrumptious meal of delicious foie gras ;) Thus, onwards and forward it goes in our quest to find a way to utilize this early holiday present.

In the 20 or so months that I've been tracking this term, it has appeared on the first page of results on 3 relatively brief occasions before. Notice though, how it is prone to make quick jumps up and then slowly receive slightly better positions over time.

Rather than waiting for it to slip away again, I have come to the conclusion that this keyword combination could help DineSXM in achieving some well deserved exposure elsewhere. If Google regards our website as a valuable resource, a place that people might want to visit when they perform a search for Restaurant Reservations, then why not capitalize on it by adding more useful information on:

how restaurant reservations are made,
where (other than with us) visitors can go to make their restaurant reservations,
what the benefits are for restaurant owners and guests to make reservations online,
the ability to run a DineMonkey powered restaurant reservation site in new locations,
etc, etc...

I'm off now to buy a frame, oh yes! Or, actually - two frames: as soon as I return to my office, I'll hang the image above on the wall IN FRONT of my desk, so that it can remind me every day of what I should be working on. And, I'll hang the picture below right next to it. Then, all will be quiet from me for a while - you can all kiss my ass and search Google yourselves. I'll come back in a few months to let you know what happened to DineSXM dot com - the #1 restaurant reservations website, period!

So long, and thanks for all the fish! - Norbert

Benchmark survey of Destination Websites - Part 3

2009-12-15T18:42:00.003-04:00

[Disclaimer: I'm feeling a bit cheeky today - comments are not meant to offend, kthxbai]

The third edition of our survey includes two new websites to replace ZebraBot and Discover-StMaarten, namely BestStMaarten and MapSXM. To complicate matters even more, Ken @ Discover has just reopened his site to the public, and our friends at the St. Maarten Tourist Bureau are now making a renewed effort with their "EngAAging New Web 2.0 Site" - oh well... Welcome back Ken!

In other news, Jeff is planning the relaunch of his EverythingUnderTheSunAndMore megasite - possibly committing seppuku in the process by switching to a new, and even longer domain name. Thank goodness for 301 redirects :) VisitStMaarten has recently been hit by Google's -900 penalty, it's unfortunate that they could not pass muster as the site probably underwent a manual review. Too many spammy links... Dang!

Conclusion: our next survey will once again include Discover-StMaarten, taking the place of VacationStMaarten. The jury is still out on SHTA's consumer site...

Still with me? OK, great! Cause here are the October results:

Just for laughs, you could compare the traffic that DineSXM gets via a single topic - restaurant information - with some of the "all-encompassing" resources... Or, you could go back to the results from our first and second benchmark surveys and notice that we've nicely moved up a few spots, becoming one of the top-10 St. Maarten / St. Martin websites.

Letting the traffic numbers from WebsiteOutlook speak for themselves, except for the inclusion of our own historical estimates for MapSXM and BestStMaarten, we see that most St. Maarten websites were able to rebound from a rather horrific Summer.

Comparing Spring and Fall figures, the larger websites St-Maarten.com and StMaarten.com both lost a bit of traffic. But that shouldn't be impossible to fix... Jan isn't known for twiddling his thumbs, and neither are the Mayers. StMaarten.org, a mid-size player, took a bit of a hit as well - but that could be due to Sam's usual hiatus during the Summer months. As soon as he kicks the newsletter back into gear we'll probably see him soaring again. At SXM-Info, Erich too needs to get off his lazy butt :) StMaarten-Info is still suffering from their design change earlier this year - c'mon Terrence, you can do it!

The newcomers, DineSXM and MapSXM, are the only winners! I have a lot of respect for Birgit, she seems to be very clearheaded and purpose driven... Not sure how far "free" will get them or if it will last, but they're definitely this year's success story.

2010 will bring even more fun! Happy New Year...

Norbert

Benchmark survey of Destination Websites - Part 2

2009-10-17T19:27:00.011-04:00

In part one of this analysis (read it now if you haven't yet), I wrote about how we selected our sample of websites for the benchmark survey. We follow fifteen websites that provide visitor information for the island of St. Maarten / St. Martin in the Caribbean. Update, there's now a part three as well.

Our first observation point, which we will use as a baseline for comparison with future data, was the end of April 2009. Initially, we only meant to use the data as a way to gauge the strength of DineSXM.com versus other information providers. But, our curiosity got the better of us during the slow Summer season and we repeated the excersise: the next dataset is from the end of August, four months later. Since the second dataset revealed a lot of interesting material, it has now become our intention to repeat the survey once every quarter. Hence, we'll take our third performance snapshot of SXM tourist information sites at the end of October, and follow it up once more in January of 2010.

1st snapshot: April 2009

The graph below shows a histogram of estimated daily page views, together with a line diagram of each site's traffic rank. The figures are based on data from WebsiteOutlook, which was retrieved on or around April 25, 2009.

When we took our first comparative look, the DineSXM restaurant reservations and dining guide had only been online for 14 months. It was reassuring to see it compare well to established properties like Mr. St.Maarten and Everything St. Maarten on our left, and close enough to SXM Info - another longtime player in the market.

Other remarkable findings include the success of another newcomer, namely Discover-StMaarten, and the ability of St-Maarten dot com to maintain such a high traffic ranking after losing its affiliation with the Tourist Office. As the original developer of VisitStMaarten, I was also pleased to see my other brainchild, built as a consumer portal for the St. Maarten Hospitalty and Trade Association during my tenure as its Executive Director, do really well.

The follow-up: August 2009

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. General interest in island travel information tends to die out somewhat as potential visitors spend less time surfing the web and aren't making plans yet for their upcoming Caribbean vacation.

We expected a general drop in traffic, but not quite the drama that is depicted in the image below...

Where did they all go? St-Maarten dot com traffic rank drops to under 2,000,000. ZebraBot is completely repurposed. StMaarten-Info changes ownership and gets a design overhaul. Discover-StMaarten ceases operations. And finally, Mr. St. Maarten loses some 30-40% of traffic, presumably due to a design change. There are also some positive developments: VacationStMaarten and VisitStMaarten seem to be growing, TravelTalkOnline and DineSXM are both holding their ground during low season.

In about a week, we'll take a renewed look at our competitive environment. The season is about to start... DineSXM underwent some minor, yet important changes over the Summer, it will be interesting to see if those changes have their intended effect.

Meanwhile, we'll be looking for two new websites to replace ZebraBot and Discover-StMaarten. One likely candidate is Best-StMartin. The second one is still up in the air. Our colleagues at Litemoon have recently launched yet another directory, maybe we'll include their MapSXM in the mix...

We're always open to ideas, please leave your comments and suggestions below!

Norbert

Benchmark survey of Destination Websites - Part 1

2009-08-27T23:22:00.016-04:00

Part 1: Sample Selection and Preliminary Results

The DineSXM restaurant and dining guide for the island of St. Martin/St. Maarten was launched in early 2008. Now that the site is in its second year of existence, it receives a steady stream of visitors who are looking for reliable information on the best places to eat on our Caribbean island. Next to providing very extensive and detailed restaurant profiles, the site also lets visitors rate and review restaurants that they have visited, and it allows them to make guaranteed online table reservations at some 50 participating locations on both sides of the island.

Our online booking engine was built in-house and is now available for licensing in other locations through DineMonkey. It's a pretty cool piece of software that was written in Python and works with the industry-strength Zope2 application server. Features are pretty much comparable with those of major online booking services like OpenTable, LiveBookings, TopTable, DiningCity, etc. Except, better of course :)

Anyway... While visitor traffic and the number of transactions are growing at a decent pace, it's also interesting to look at how the site as a whole compares to other St. Maarten / St. Martin information websites. Most of these have been long-established, and some have the blessing of "officialdom" through the local tourist office or hotel association. Both kinds of traits tend to be important to the success of a site that purports to give visitors high quality information. DineSXM is in many ways still a new kid on the block.

Several months ago, as the site had just reached its first anniversary, we decided to do a bit of comparative analisys. We pretended to be a potential visitor of our beautiful island, and trying to get an idea of what it's like to spend our next vacation in the Caribbean. In other words: we asked our magic crystal ball (which goes by the name of Googahoo Yaglebing) to give us a general idea of the types of websites that our visitors might also be interested in viewing when looking for general St. Maarten and St. Martin destination information.

With Googahoo's help we compiled a list of about 100 potential sources of information on the destination. Then we removed the obvious corporate spam (Tripadvisor, Expedia, Fodor, Tripit, etc.) and sites that are primarily geared to "sell" accommodation. Specific activity sites would also be taken out: sailing and boating, cruises, and so on. Our preference went out to sites that have a distinct local focus. They must have varied types of destination information (activities, restaurants, beaches, nightlife) but should not be directly geared to selling trips or roomnights...

General Caribbean info sites, out. Hobby sites, albeit sometimes a great source of information, were also weeded out for our purposes.

After we ran out of red ink (read: the delete key broke), we were left with about 20-25 websites that were somewhat homogenous in their format, with the exception of a travel forum website that gets a decent amount of traffic (see graphs in the upcoming blog post) - of which most is related to general SXM vacation information.

At some point, we had come across WebsiteOutlook. A site which lets you type in a domain name and then spits out some general traffic and ranking results. It's one of many that offers such a service, but in our case it had given us verifiably accurate (within margins of course) data in the past. So, we decided to use it again and fed it our initial selection of domains. From those results, we took the top 15 traffic websites. Our magic sample size ended up at 15, only because most sites turned out to receive very few visitors. We set the minimum daily number of visitors to be that of the "official" tourist board website - the lowest ranking site in our sample (let's just not open that can of worms).

Between April 23 and 25, we fed the traffic ranking service the following domains:

For each domain, we noted the estimated number of daily pageviews, traffic rank, number of backlinks and Google Pagerank (just for the hell of it, as the information it gives is known not to be actionable). Next, we plotted the numbers in a very exciting Excel graph, wich resulted in the following candy-colored image:

As you can see, none of these sites are actually very busy Click the graph to enlarge the image. They range from approximately 100 to a little less than 10,000 daily pageviews each. The busiest website with information relating to St. Maarten had a traffic rank of 192,000 as of April 2009. In the next part of this article, I will dissect this preliminary ranking a bit more and try to draw some conclusions.

In the meantime, why not visit the DineSXM restaurant guide yourself and get the latest info on what St. Maarten & St. Martin Restaurants have to offer.

Analyzing search engine ranking results

2009-06-03T22:16:00.011-04:00

Since our launch of DineSXM.com in February 2008, search engine traffic has contributed significantly to the site's growth. In the 3 month period from March 1st until May 31st 2009, approximately 63% of visitors came to our restaurant reservations and dining guide by following a link from a search engine. This number is up from 25% in the same period in 2008.

In the 16 months that the site has been online, we have been able to determine what the types of keywords are that:

bring visitors to DineSXM,
result in conversion activities

Conversion activities include actions such as registering with the site, adding user generated content such as restaurant ratings and reviews, and -most importantly- making online reservations.

Our main finding is that two separate groups of visitors are most likely to convert. The largest of the two segments consists of persons who search for a specific restaurant by including its name in the query term - these visitors have reached the end of their decision making process and are ready to finalize their transaction. DineSXM is able to successfully answer the user's query by providing them with the ability to make their restaurant reservation online.

In contrast, the second sizable group is still in an exploratory phase: their search is focused enough to specify their intended activity (dining / visiting a restaurant) on St. Maarten or St. Martin, but their decision as to which restaurant to visit has yet to be made. In similar fashion, the latter group hasn't quite made up their mind yet as to which types of cuisine, environment, or neighborhood they are going to visit.

Today's analysis of DineSXM's search engine performance will focus on the keywords that are used by people who are looking to find assistance on our website in order to help them make a decision. In this situation, DineSXM is able to add significant value as a service - both to our participating restaurants, and also to potential guests who are browsing the site. Rather than just serving as a transaction platform (by facilitating the booking), the website's quality content and consistent presentation is what drives the visitor to conclude their search process and become a paying restaurant guest.

The terms that have been identified as strong drivers are keyword phrases that specify the geographic location: (St. Maarten / St. Martin, SXM) in combination with the activity that a visitor intends to research (dine / dining / restaurant / restaurants).

In order for a search result to be among the ones being followed -clicked on - by a potential site visitor, at least three conditions have to be met. Two are under the control of a webmaster, and one is determined by the search engine's algorithm. The latter one is something a welll organized website can be optimized for, and thus can be influenced in part.

Title of the resource
Search engines utilize the title of a resource (page) as the heading of the search result and as a link to the item that is shown. Furthermore, that text is often bolded and underlined. It acts as the first visible cue to a user, as to what they will find if they click on the link that is presented to them.

DineSXM utilizes titles that include what the site is about, and the section of the website that is about to be visited. The second part of the title is capitalized, to stand out from other results. A user's decision as to which of the results to explore further is made in a fraction of a second. Predictably, clear and descriptive titles, such as the ones provided by the DineSXM website, will usually be the deciding factor.
Excerpt of the resource
In general, while search engines decide which exact text to use when displaying a descriptive text for the resource, webmasters can influence this by providing a relevant snippet.

In our experience, search engines will prefer to show what is supplied to them. DineSXM supplies the search engines with clear, concise, and descriptive text that can be used as an excerpt - thus leading even more visitors to click-through and visit our dining guide.
Position amongst the results displayed to the user
Complete books have been written about the ever-changing algorithms that search engines employ to decide the sequence of results that is presented for a certain keyword phrase. Suffice it to say that we carefully monitor a large basket of common keyphrases that are important in guiding visitors to DineSXM. The graphics presented here are based on our daily observations of ranking changes.

Since ranking results are known to fluctuate, it is important to determine which factors are most likely to affect a page's position among other possible results shown to a user. One of the primary indicators that determine the relevance of a particular resource for a certain combination of keywords is the quality of content that will be provided to a visitor, both on the to be visited page itself, and in a more general sense on the website as a whole.

That is exactly why we continue to build out the restaurant guide with clearly written, reliable, quality information. The website's restaurant updates, user reviews, articles, and even the recipe section serve to complement and increase the value of DineSXM to our users. We also try to make it easy for search engines to understand what we're all about: one of our most recent enhancements was to include additional hints that make it possible to parse address information and reviews directly from DineSXM pages.

Looking at Bing and Google Squared, our crystal ball tells us that the major search engines will utilize these types of enhancements, in order to present their visitors with useful, actionable results. DineSXM is fully planning to leverage the engines' presentation changes to our advantage.

The data presented here serves to highlight that DineSXM is doing a great, and fairly consistent, job in ranking for its money keywords. There is still some room for improvement, I'd like to see us in the top 3 for all these combinations. The trend is that our ranking positions are still improving, which leads me to think that our goal is very much attainable.

For most phrases we now rank in Google's top 5 results: above the fold and in some cases with an extended or double listings. Not too bad for a new site, I'd say. For searches that have to do with "dining" the graphics show a relative advantage overall compared to "restaurants" in the search term.

Some new questions are also raised, like what is causing "st martin restaurants" and "st maarten dining" to be such outliers? I'm lacking a logical explanation for this. Looking at the source data, I am less worried about the former because it has not been fluctuating as much as "st maarten dining" and I can understand that "restaurants" is more competitive than "dining." I could envision the phrase dropping down to where it belongs as the site grows larger and gains more trust.

Google clearly sees SXM, St. Maarten and St. Martin as synonyms and I'm tempted to believe that the domain name is of importance in explaining our performance with regard to Dining vs Restaurants. A factor could be the relative search frequency of various terms.

Some major changes to DineSXM have been made since these graphs were created. In the past month, we have started adding more content, nearly duplicating the number of restaurants for which we have information available.

This marks a big departure from our initial goal, which was to profile only venues that can be booked online. Time will tell if we made the right decision: insofar that summary, or teaser, descriptions of -all- restaurants on the island will lead to more transactions for our featured (and paying) restaurants.

Every restaurant on the island should be on DineSXM. As a restaurant owner, you stand to gain with a featured listing. The price is right, and among St. Maarten / St. Martin websites, we're the only ones that give you regular feedback and updates on your online performance. It's time for everyone to stop complaining about the recession and instead start doing something about it. Our best performing restaurants are on top of things -and it definitely shows!

Get on top of things: join DineSXM. Read the listing information on our website and give us a call - you'll be glad you did!

DineSXM on Facebook

2009-04-08T19:05:00.007-04:00

Below is a screen capture of DineSXM's new Facebook page (login required). We use it to promote special events that are organized by more than 40 restaurants that are featured on the DineSXM restaurant guide.

Examples of these types of events are the Free Dinner Ladies Night at 3palms resto-lounge on Wednesdays, Jazz and Tapas on the Beach - Fridays at Karakter Beach Bus, the 2nd annual Taste of St. Maarten in Simpson Bay, Wine & Cheese Tastings at Sopranos restaurant and more...

Besides being featured on the DineSXM Facebook page, these specials are also promoted through the 24/7 SXM blog. The blog is a precursor to the soon to be launched Twentyfour Seven SXM website at http://www.247sxm.com

See the links below for more information on these and other St. Maarten / St. Martin events:

Several restaurants on St. Maarten and St. Martin have already created their own individual restaurant pages on Facebook. There is no cost involved, and it's an easy way to advertise menu changes and special events. Facebook members can choose to become a "fan" of these pages, receive event invitations, and be notified automatically whenever there are updates regarding their favorite restaurants. You'll already find DineSXM restaurants such as Peg Leg Pub and Steakhouse, Captain Oliver's, Ocean Lounge, 3palms resto-lounge, The Stone, and Toppers. Restaurants such as Don Camillo and RomAntica have also found Facebook, but are not on DineSXM yet... We hope that they will join soon.

Contact us today to get your restaurant listed and benefit from additional promotion on Facebook and the 24/7 Blog. More details and listing information can be found on the DineSXM website.

404 Error: Restaurant not found - Part V (The Roundup)

2009-02-19T20:43:00.005-04:00

Out of curiosity, I compiled a summary of the 102 restaurant names that visitors of the DineSXM dining guide unsuccessfully typed into our search box hoping to find their favorite place to eat on our dining guide.

Of the 61 different restaurants that sere searched for, a whopping 10 came up 3 or more times in the four weeks that I tallied. They stand to benefit the most from being listed on DineSXM.

They are:

Le Cottage 4

Mario's Bistro 4

Pineapple Pete's 4

Spiga 4

Big Fish 3

La Gondola 3

L'Escapade 3

Mark's Place 3

Sol e Luna 3

Yvette's 3

The following restaurants came up in at least two of our weekly lists of unfindable restaurants, compiled once a week during a period of 4 weeks: Bajatzu, Don Camillo, Karibuni, La Cigale, La Rosa II, La Samanna, Lady C Floating Bar & Grill, Layla's, Le Pressoir, Le Tastevin, Lee's Roadside Grill, Pizza Pasta, Ric's Place, Saratoga, Sunset Bar & Grill, The Greenhouse, Tropicana.

If you happen to visit one of the above, please tell them they're in high demand and point them to the DineSXM listing info sheet at http://www.dinesxm.com/listing-information :)

404 Error: Restaurant not found - Part IV (Final)

2009-02-19T20:14:00.004-04:00

Astute readers will have understood by now that many St. Martin and St. Maarten restaurants still haven't latched on to the internet yet. Yes, it's Thursday again and I find myself posting another list of unfindable restaurants. This is the final installment for now, because I feel like I'm beating this horse to death.

It's all about marketing guys! The Indian saying comes to mind: "You cannot wake a man who pretends that he's sleeping". In the listing below, you can see the names of places to eat on our island that were searched for on DineSXM in the past week.

The interesting part of this experiment was that, rather than receiving questions from concerned restaurant owners who found themselves on the list, the pages of this blog that list unfindables have started to come up in regular Google searches that were made by prospective guests. A great percentage of Saint Martin / Sint Maarten visitors goes online to prepare for their vacation, and they're looking to find information on restaurants that have exciting menus, great service, and a welcoming ambiance.

Sorry to disappoint you, folks! The restaurants below are not on the DineSXM Dining Guide yet...

Bella Napoli
Big Fish
Buccaneer Bar
Calmos Cafe
Cherie's Cafe
Don Camillo
Get Wet Beach Bar
Golden Apple
Karibuni
L'Astrolabe
L'Escapade
La Gondola
La Samanna
Lady C Floating Bar & Grill
Le Cottage
Le Tropicana
Mario's Bistro
Mark's Place
Pineapple Pete's
Pizza Galley
Pizza Pasta
Rainbow Club
Sol e Luna
Spiga
Sunset Bar & Grill
Thai Savanh
The Greenhouse
Yvette's
Zee Best

As an owner or manager of one of these restaurants, you should TAKE ACTION NOW! Seriously, don't delay and get yourself listed on the island's only dining guide that lets visitors make guaranteed reservations. Join nearly 50 restaurants on the island of St. Martin /St. Maarten that are already online. A quick email will do the trick: info@dinesxm.com - I repeat: don't delay!

Get started by taking a quick look at our listing information and pricing. We're looking forward to give you an opportunity to stand out from the crowd and get the attention you deserve.

404 Error: Restaurant not found - Part III

2009-02-12T19:47:00.006-04:00

Yet another Thursday, and it's time again for our weekly listing of "unfindable" restaurants. Below are the names of restaurants on the island of Sint Maarten / Saint Martin that people have searched for on DineSXM in the past week.

They're missing in action - so to speak - and will be overlooked as visitors of the DineSXM dining guide are making their decisions on where to eat once they'll reach our Friendly Island.

As an owner or manager of one of these restaurants, you can prevent this from happening again. Get your establishment listed on the DineSXM restaurant reservations and dining guide, and join nearly 50 restaurants that are already online. A quick email will do the trick: info@dinesxm.com - don't delay!

Bajatzu
Big Fish
Daniel's by the Sea
Hidden Forest Cafe @ Loterie Farm
Karibuni
L'Escapade
La Rosa II
La Samanna
Lady C Floating Bar & Grill
Layla's
Le Chanteclair
Le Cottage
Le Rainbow
Le Tastevin
Lee's Roadside Grill
Ma-Ti Beach
Mario's Bistro
Mark's Place
Oualichi
Pineapple Pete's
Pizza Pasta
Quai Ouest
Rancho del Sol
Ric's Place
Saratoga
Spiga
Thai Garden
Tropicana
Turtle Pier
Yvette's

If you read the previous installments of our missing restaurants list: Part I and Part II, you'll notice that several restaurant names come up more than once. They're more than welcome to join, we'd love to give them an opportunity to get the attention they deserve.

Visit DineSXM to browse the profiles of nearly 50 restaurants. Or, see here for listing information and pricing.

404 Error: Restaurant not found - Part II

2009-02-05T19:48:00.007-04:00

Time for the second installment of Thursday's DineSXM missing restaurant roundup. The restaurants below were searched for on the DineSXM website in the past 7 days but could not be found because their owners did not take action yet...

If you see the name of your establishment among these places to eat on Sint Maarten and Saint Martin, your guests are having a hard time to reach you and find out what you have to offer. They are likely to pass you by and have their lunch or dinner somewhere else. Get yourself listed on the DineSXM restaurant reservations and dining guide, and join nearly 50 restaurants that are already online. See here for restaurant listing information and prices or email: info@dinesxm.com today!

Antoine's
Bay View @ Sonesta
Chesterfield's
Don Camillo
Harbour Queen
L'Escapade
L'Escargot
La Bodega
La Cigale
La Gondola
La Rosa II
Layla's
Le Cottage
Le Pressoir
Le Tastevin
Mama Pizza
Mario's Bistro
Mark's Place
Pineapple Pete's
Ric's Place
Saratoga
Sol e Luna
Spiga
Sunset Bar & Grill
Ti Bouchon
Tropicana
Yvette's

The DineSXM website is dishing out an average of 500 restaurant profiles each day. Think about it, do you really want your competition to get all the attention? Join DineSXM!

404 Error: Restaurant not found - Part I

2009-01-29T07:36:00.006-04:00

The Sint Maarten and Saint Martin restaurants listed below missed out on a good chance to generate extra business for their establishments. They just lost an easy opportunity to make money, only because they failed to list their venue on the DineSXM restaurant reservations and dining guide.

We know this to be a fact, since we can tell what visitors of our site type in our search widget when trying to look up an establishment by name. In the past week, we could not help our visitors as they searched for:

Bajatzu
Big Fish
Claude Mini Club
Coco's
La Cigale
La Gondola
Le Cottage
Le Planteur
Le Pressoir
Lee's Roadside Grill
Mario's Bistro
Pineapple Pete's
Safari Grill
Sol e Luna
Spiga
The Greenhouse

As visitors came up empty handed when trying to find information on these venues, they probably ended up visiting their competitors instead.

For the third consecutive time, our monthly traffic growth percentage is in the double digits. With this kind of growth and with more and more restaurants listing their place of business on the DineSXM dining guide, the ones that don't participate will remain invisible and lose out on a great opportunity to promote their business.

If you own or manage one of the restaurants that were searched for in the past 7 days, you are now turning away guests who already know about your establishment and who are specifically trying to find out more details about your business. Stop ignoring your customers: join DineSXM today. Visit our website to find out how to get listed.

Markus Frind - Inspirational Mind

2009-01-15T15:36:00.006-04:00

The only way to grow a site once it's running itself is to have brilliant ideas. Great ideas don’t come from sitting in front of the computer screen for 8 hours of the day wondering what to do next. You have to be inspired or have a really deep understanding of what is going on. So a Brilliant idea may start a business but you need to have many many more brilliant ideas if you are going to go from one of many to an industry leader.

Amen to that! Markus developed the online dating website Plenty of Fish in 2001 and single-handedly grew it to the world's largest in less than 5 years. Read the previous sentence again, chances are you missed what I just wrote: sin-gle-han-ded-ly grew it to the world's largest.

We're inspired by what Markus did, because we see so many parallels between his achievements and ours. Bringing people together on a dating site is much like bringing guests into a restaurant. Guests have a lot of options to choose from, and they are insecure about what is being offered. Will the restaurant meet their expectations in terms of cuisine, price, decor and ambiance, service, friendliness, and general satisfaction? With more than 300 restaurants on the island, there are "plenty of fish" to choose from in Grand Case, Simpson Bay, Philipsburg and Orient Bay...

Many questions that guests have, can already be answered prior to their actual "date" with the restaurant. Much like Plenty of Fish's online dating profiles, DineSXM introduces guests to restaurants and takes away their insecurity by giving them a taste of what lies ahead through extensive restaurant profiles. DineSXM profiles include a description of each venue, contact information, restaurant slideshows, menu suggestions, neighborhood maps and more. Like dating prospects, places can be viewed by location, cuisine, price, specialties, rating and popularity. Even better, our site also gives future guests the ability to read "dating reviews" - the experiences of past visitors of a restaurant. If all checks out, guests can make arrangements to "go on a date" right on the DineSXM website - by booking their favorite restaurant online!

Markus saw the potential of his website by offering something that people want. He understood that people are sometimes hesitant and look for assurances before comitting to a date. DineSXM does the exact same thing by giving visitors of St. Maarten and St. Martin a taste of what your restaurant has to offer. With nearly 50 restaurants online right now, we are "THE" restaurant reservations and dining guide.

Inspired by "Plenty of Fish" and its free dating profiles, we have decided to give restaurants an opportunity to try us out for free too. Save up to $600 and get listed for free until 1/1/2010, simply contact us at info[at]dinesxm.com and mention "Plenty of Fish" in your email.

How is your restaurant getting by?

2008-12-22T18:13:00.016-04:00

Jeffrey Summers of Restaurant Coaching Solutions is our hero of the day! While we have not had the pleasure to meet Jeffrey in person yet, we can easily picture him as the Dirty Harry of the Hospitality Consulting Biz. His latest Tweet was again spot on. He asks: why settle for "getting by" instead of reaching for the top?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says it like this: "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected." We wholeheartedly agree: if you aim to be mediocre, you'll probably achieve your goal - but never more than that...

Nothing new, by the way. Michelangelo (via Tom Peters "50 Rules for Leading in Totally Screwed-Up Times") said: The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

So, HOW IS your restaurant getting by? Are you taking the bull by the horns? Why not? Do you like seeing empty seats? Didn't think so!

You're missing the boat if you own a restaurant on St. Maarten or St. Martin and haven't discovered DineSXM by now. We put people in seats, just ask the owners of these 32^* restaurants that we have already made online bookings for... DineSXM aims high, we want ALL 300 SXM restaurants on board and bookable online by 2010.

Yes, we're in a recession. No, it's not going to end soon. And you thought that it was bad after hurricane Louis, or after September 11... Look at this graph that we swiped from Jens Lapinski's blog, it shows the Dow Jones Index year-on-year percentage change. See where the graph ends, at minus 35 percent? That's where we are now...

Yes, that's how bad things are. Jens put it into words much better than we ever could, here's a direct quote for you:

I think that even if you have been in business for 30 years, you have actually not seen really bad times. The last time it was bad was in the 1960s/1970s. Everything since then has been smooth sailing, including the burst of the dot.com bubble.

So, are you still planning on "getting by" or will you hustle your way out of this mess and come out on top? Join DineSXM, and show that you have the guts to fight the recession head-on. GET LISTED TODAY!

^* including A Taste of Bliss, French Touch, Le Gaiac and Los Gauchos, which unfortunately are now closed.

Restaurants may close, but their profiles live on...

2008-12-08T10:23:00.013-04:00

Imagine the following conversation, taking place sometime in the summer of 2007:

Angel investor: "So, you want to build a reservation engine for restaurants in Sint Maarten and Saint Martin?"

Me: "Ehm, yes... I think that visitors like to plan parts of their vacation ahead of time. Returning timeshare owners, for example, often go out to dinner with groups of friends they've met on previous visits. A lot of couples look forward to romantic dinners on the beach. People who live on the island go out for dinner to celebrate birthdays and family events. And then there's Valentine's, Regatta Week, Harmony Nights, you name it!"

Angel investor: "Ok, maybe... But, how will you make money?"

Me: "Well, the way it would work is that we'd ask restaurant owners to pay us a small fee for taking the reservation. There are an estimated 300 to 400 restaurants on both sides of the island. The website could grow fast and become really useful if we can offer the service at a low per-unit cost. We'd need to be able to achieve some volume, but here: just take a look at this spreadsheet! It's a conservative estimate, with 30% market penetration and an average of 1 booking per participating restaurant a day."

Angel investor (smiling): "I see. And that's just on SXM? Did you think about offering the service elsewhere?"

Me (excited): "Duh, absolutely! We already registered the domain names for a dozen other places in the region. Once DineSXM takes off, it will be easy to show restaurant owners on other islands how they can benefit too..."

Angel investor: "Hold on one sec."

The investor taps away at his keyboard for a few seconds and heads off to pick up a printout... As he returns, he hands me a sheet of paper and continues:

Angel investor: "The idea sounds nice, but something worries me. Have you seen this Business Week article on restaurant failure rates? American Express said that nine out of 10 restaurants fail in the first year. This university guy Parsa at Ohio State thinks it's less - but still... How will you get paid if restaurants go bust before you can get them to make good on your invoices? (laughs) You'll probably spend most of your time updating the website and keeping track of all the closings anyway. Forget about collecting - there's not enough time in a day! It's a no-go, sorry!"

Me (speechless): "No, wait..."

Unfortunately, such a conversation never took place. Even though we did a lot of research before starting DineSXM and I actually did read the article during our start-up phase, the consequences of a high restaurant closure rate on our ability to do business were not as clear to me then as they are now. Since February 2008, when we launched the site, several restaurants that signed up for our service have already closed their doors: Le Gaiac, Le Pink Pot, A Taste of Bliss, French Touch, Picante, Los Gauchos, and now possibly also La Vie en Rose. I have to note that not all of those businesses failed: two closed because of hurricane damage, and one restaurateur decided to continue the business at a new - off-island - location.

Now, ten months into it, the reality is starting to set in. There is no use to try collecting small amounts from any place after it has closed, we need a workable alternative to support our business model.

One of the ideas we floated around the office was to ask for a deposit against future reservations. But, that goes completely against arguments that we use to promote our service among restaurant managers and owners: that they only have to pay for performance. Other than a small listing fee, payment for reservations is due only after a guest has visited the restaurant.

There's no risk for the restaurateur: the amount of visibility gained through a listing on DineSXM is significant and compares favorably to other advertising options. Even when no bookings are made directly through our website, we like to think that joining our site makes a lot of sense for any venue that offers breakfast, lunch, or dinner... Until very recently, we even waived the listing fee in order to grow our coverage.

Visitors of the island, as well as residents, have quickly found out about us and are happily browsing the DineSXM website to find out information about restaurants they'd like to visit. They still mostly call directly or just show up, but our online bookings have increased quite a bit with the high season getting closer. All signals look promising, and our overall outlook stays positive. It just takes some time.

Another way to monetize the site and generate additional cash flow would be to introduce advertising, but this would potentially diminish the value that we offer to guests and restaurateurs. Ads are distracting and could lessen our perceived credibility and integrity. Also important is that any visitor who ends up clicking off our site through an ad would constitute a lost opportunity to generate a booking.

The recent spate of restaurant closings pushed us to rethink how we can maintain a high level of service in an unpredictable environment. Providing accurate and up to date information - including information about restaurants that have closed - is one of the ways to go about it. The answer lies, hopefully, in improving our usefulness even further and maximizing the value that visitors receive from utilizing our site.

While not directly generating more revenue, providing information that visitors can rely on helps to establish us as the preferred source of credible, timely and comprehensive local dining information. DineSXM has to become the gateway to all that has to do with dining on the island of St. Martin and St. Maarten. In turn, we expect this to have a positive effect on converting site visitors into guests who book online. Ideally, visitors to the site who are planning a vacation to the island and residents who search for restaurant information should not even think about calling the restaurant.

Even though the possibility of generating a revenue through bookings and listing fees is gone once a restaurant shuts their doors, the information itself can still be useful to our visitors. Historical listing information maintains a certain amount of intrinsic value when it makes guests aware of the closing; letting them know about the restaurant's change in status and offering them possible alternatives. Restaurants may close, but their profiles live on...

As of today, the profiles of closed restaurants have been excluded from regular listings but remain available for viewing when searching a venue by name or through the advanced search feature on the DineSXM homepage. Their reviews will also remain visible for the time being. And, of course, visitors will still be able to find the restaurant's profile through the major search engines. Profiles themselves have also changed a bit: instead of the booking widget, historical profiles now contain a section with links to other restaurants nearby. And when a new restaurant opens in its place and joins DineSXM, we'll update the old description to include a link to the new venue.

Meanwhile, the site keeps growing: Captain Oliver's, Le Moulin Fou and Blue Martini Bistro can now be found online and take bookings through our service, a lot of new restaurant reviews have been added in the past month, and both repeat visits as well as membership numbers are growing considerably.

I realize that this post has become somewhat lengthy and unwieldy... Rather than censoring my stream of consciousness, I hope that it can serve to make other entrepreneurs realize that the devil is always in the details and that you can never completely predict the future, even when you prepare well. The challenge lies in envisioning and planning for contingencies, and to be ready -to react quickly- when you run a situation that you have failed to foresee...

Ok, now: enough bullshit - let's get back to work!

Crystal Pineapple Awards 2008 - Vote for DineSXM

2008-11-12T19:26:00.003-04:00

DineSXM is one of the final three nominees for a Crystal Pineapple Award, in the "Outstanding Community Tourism" category. The award is an annual celebration of people and organizations that are active in Hospitality and Tourism on the island of St. Maarten / St. Martin and the Caribbean region. Now for its third consecutive year, the St. Maarten Hospitality and Trade Association (SHTA) organizes the awards event to recognize the drivers behind the island's tourism economy.

The company was nominated for its web-based restaurant reservations and dining guide, a service in which more 40 restaurants on both sides of the island currently participate. Visitors of the DineSXM restaurant reservations and dining guide at DineSXM.com can browse extensive restaurant profiles of participating venues and make confirmed dining reservations based on each restaurant's table allotment. The website, launched in February 2008, includes sections with dining reviews, recipes and news / current events.

Now in its 10th month of operation, the restaurant guide is already receiving 13,000 page views a month (October 2008) and has contributed to an increased awareness of the island's variety in restaurants and menu offerings.

=============================================
Vote for DineSXM at the SHTA Crystal Pineapple Awards
=============================================

The SHTA is now gathering votes to decide the final winners of the award. Please cast your online vote for DineSXM in the "Outstanding Community Tourism" category. To vote, click the link below:

http://www.shta.com/poll.php?poll=27

Don't forget to type your email address in the appropriate field and confirm your vote by clicking the link in the SHTA confirmation email. Otherwise, the vote will not be counted.

This year's award celebration includes a total of 17 categories, ranging from Rookie of the Year to Outstanding Environmental Achievement. The awards will be presented during a Black Tie culinary fundraising event that is organized by SHTA on November 28. For more information, visit http://www.shta.com

DineSXM Restaurant profiles "I18n"

2008-11-07T19:28:00.004-04:00

I have just finished implementing the first internationalization ("I18n") features on DineSXM. Each of our restaurant descriptions can now be automatically translated from English into French, Dutch, Spanish and German. The translation quality is not perfect, it's done automatically on-demand through Yahoo's BabelFish service, but should still help those guests whose mother tongue is not English to get a better idea of what a restaurant has to offer. Take a look below at how Halsey's profile looks when translated into French:

The translation gets made through some calls to the Yahoo Pipes service once a visitor clicks on one of the flags. Our server sends out a request to the pipe that we have created, which in turn asks for an XML representation of the snippet of text that is to be translated, processes it for our use and sends it back to our server - again in XML. Some Python scripting wizardry and AJAX mumbo-jumbo to put everything back together follows, and voilà (could not resist, sorry): the translation is presented to our visitor. All of this takes place in less than 400 milliseconds...

I'm planning to write a tutorial soon on the DineMonkey blog, so that anyone can add this type of translation feature to their site...

Have a Great Weekend!

No more flattery, please!

2008-11-06T08:39:00.010-04:00

Under "imitation" the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition has the following entry:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

To imitate someone is to pay the person a genuine compliment—often an unintended compliment.

I tend to agree... But, when imitation turns into plagiarism I'm not so sure anymore. In the past months, we've had to send out a few DMCA takedown notices to other webmasters who had copied our copyrighted materials from DineSXM.com and posted those on their own sites.

Today, I found something slightly different: a plagiarized version of our recent press release. The relevant excerpt is reprinted below (anonymized, of course):

Explaining the benefits of his company's new service, John Doe of example.com says that "When people book their dive trip online, there's no need to search for a dive shop’s phone number anymore. There's also no more frustration with unanswered calls, busy signals or lost reservations." Making a reservation on the example.com website takes less than a minute, and is custom tailored. Guests only have to send us email with the size of their party and how much diving they want to do. Our instructors take it from there and contact you to ensuring that each and every guest is matched with the operation that best suits their needs and then sending a confirmation email to the guest. “All this service is of no additional cost to the divers, it is like having your own personal dive instructor looking out for your best interest and safety” said Doe.

The original paragraph from our press release reads as follows:

Explaining the benefits of his company's new service, John de Vroom of DineSXM NV says that "When people book their table online, there's no need to search for a restaurant's phone number anymore. There's also no more frustration with unanswered calls, busy signals or lost reservations." Making a reservation on the DineSXM website takes less than a minute. Guests only have to check if a table is available when they want it, enter the number of people in their party, and submit the booking form. The site then takes care of the rest, by forwarding the reservation to the restaurant and sending a confirmation email to the guest. "Everything takes place automagically," de Vroom quips.

To add insult to injury, John Doe is actually someone whom I know personally and a fellow that I would not expect to do something like this. I decided that it'd be best to email him and ask what happened...

Thankfully, I received a reply almost immediately. As it turns out, he had hired a PR firm to write the release and do some SEO work on his website. The person who did the work was obviously a bit lazy and submitted a copy/paste job for review. Not having seen our release, he authorized it - only to have it be found by me shortly thereafter :) He assures me that it won't happen again and comments that "it just goes to show that if you want something done right, you're better off doing it yourself." Apology accepted, but you'll have to allow us to make fun of you for a brief moment.

Here at DineSXM, we like to do things ourselves. Even if it takes a bit more effort sometimes, at least we can vouch 100% for the quality of our work. And to all those who are tempted to appropriate our copyrighted works, I'd like to say: "No more flattery, please!" - We'll find you eventually...

DineSXM earns Google Sitelinks

2008-10-27T00:40:00.007-04:00

This weekend brought us several reasons to celebrate the overwhelming success of the DineSXM website. Yesterday we discovered that Google is ranking us on its top position for the sxm dining keyword combination. Today, the Big G surprised us with the addition of sitelinks for the website. As you can see in the image below, Google sitelinks make it easier to navigate directly from a search result to the site's most popular pages or information categories.

Sitelinks are awarded to websites that are considered authoritative on a particular subject. In a recent Webmaster World forum post, senior SEO analyst at Converseon Ted Ulle explained that "sitelinks indicate that the site satisfies a great number of people who make that particular query - a significantly greater number than the average #1 site on the average search."

As more and more SXM restaurant guests have already become aware of the DineSXM website, they type our DineSXM brand name as the keyword of their search engine query. Eighty percent of these visitors have been to our website before, a clear sign that they trust and value the information we provide about places to eat in St. Martin and St. Maarten. These visitors expect DineSXM to give them information on a restaurant they plan to visit and want the convenience of making their table reservation online.

The breakdown below shows a recent snapshot of the ten most used search engine queries that brought visitors to our website.

Search engines are currently responsible for bringing us more than 1,000 visitors a month. Compared to other sources, this group of visitors spends a longer amount of time on DineSXM and browses significantly more restaurant profiles.

With search engines delivering month-over-month visitor growth ratios that are well in the in double digits, we're looking at a bright future for St. Maarten's #1 dining website. We still have a few free listings available, but these will be gone soon, so if your restaurant is not listed yet: now is the right time to join DineSXM.

Hurricane Omar Photos - St. Maarten

2008-10-16T01:08:00.006-04:00

Omar turned from a tropical storm into a category three hurricane in less than 12 hours, and is now getting closer to the island of St. Maarten / St. Martin. Part of the DineSXM team (John & Norbert) is staying at the office tonight to weather out the storm.

We took some pictures near Halsey's Restaurant in Simpson Bay earlier this afternoon, and about an hour ago from our office near Princess Juliana International Airport (PJIA). The photos that were taken tonight have an exposure time of about 30 seconds.

It's now 1:12am island time, and we hope that our power and internet connection will stay on. 99.9 Soualiga FM, the radio station that we listen to for emergency messages has just stopped broadcasting... Whoops!

Norbert

St. Martin / St. Maarten restaurants on Twitter

2008-10-10T23:27:00.003-04:00

You can now follow DineSXM restaurant updates on Twitter - go to http://www.twitter.com/dinesxm and click the "Follow" button to stay on top of news, updates and additions to the St. Martin and St. Maarten restaurant guide at DineSXM.com.

DineSXM in the news

2008-09-11T14:44:00.005-04:00

The St. Maarten Daily Herald published our press release and pictures of the DineSXM restaurant guide in their weekly Out 'n About color supplement. This is great promotion for the website and helps to get the word out for some 40 restaurants in St. Maarten and St. Martin that are listed on the DineSXM St. Maarten / St. Martin restaurant reservations and dining guide.

We only have about 10 more free spots open. Charter participants will never have to pay an annual fee. Don't be late to the game: once 50 restaurants are signed up we'll have to start charging for our service...

DineSXM - May we take your reservation?

New for St. Maarten: Dinner Reservations Online

2008-09-09T12:41:00.000-04:00

Just in time for the high season, the DineSXM online dining guide at http://www.dinesxm.com is promoting a new service to visitors and residents of St. Maarten and St. Martin. The guide features extensive restaurant descriptions with menu suggestions, neighborhood maps, ratings and reviews. An exclusive feature of DineSXM is that visitors of the site can make guaranteed breakfast, lunch and dinner reservations ahead of time.

Explaining the benefits of his company's new service, John de Vroom of DineSXM NV says that "When people book their table online, there's no need to search for a restaurant's phone number anymore. There's also no more frustration with unanswered calls, busy signals or lost reservations." Making a reservation on the DineSXM website takes less than a minute. Guests only have to check if a table is available when they want it, enter the number of people in their party, and submit the booking form. The site then takes care of the rest, by forwarding the reservation to the restaurant and sending a confirmation email to the guest. "Everything takes place automagically," de Vroom quips.

Nearly 40 island favorites, including places such as Bamboo Bernie's, Peg Leg Pub, Sopranos, The Ocean Lounge and Fusion on the Dutch side, or La Vie en Rose, Brasserie de la Gare, and La Petite Auberge des Iles on the French side have started taking online reservations since the site launched in February 2008. While the first fifty restaurants can join at no cost, DineSXM will soon start charging a fee for new additions. About ten more free spots are left. The company only charges its restaurants a small fee for each person who books through the DineSXM website.

Liesa Euton, owner of Los Gauchos Argentine Grill, was among the first restaurateurs to join in. Touting the advantages of being listed on DineSXM, she mentions: "Many of our guests want to find out about restaurants before they come down on vacation. Taking reservations through the web is a useful extra service that has been easy for us to offer. Since joining in March, we also received many exciting reviews from DineSXM visitors. This sort of customer feedback is important for us, we want to make sure that our guests stay satisfied with our restaurant, the food and service."

In little more than six months since its initial launch, DineSXM has risen to the top of search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. With over 50,000 pages viewed by 12,000 visitors, the site at http://www.dinesxm.com is quickly becoming one of the island's main resources on dining information. Restaurant owners who would like to find out more are invited to contact John de Vroom at info@dinesxm.com or by phone at +599 545-2256.

Get dining reviews on your blog!

2008-09-02T16:17:00.005-04:00

Fresh SXM dining reviews and St. Maarten / St. Martin restaurant news is now available in RSS format from DineSXM. We have added a second feed that displays the 10 newest restaurant reviews, in addition to our main feed of DineSXM articles and restaurant profile updates.

Grab your feed now and enhance your St. Maarten / St. Martin blog, add it to your live bookmarks, or subscribe with your favorite reader:

DineSXM restaurant updates: http://www.dinesxm.com/RSS

DineSXM dining reviews: http://www.dinesxm.com/RSS/reviews

Introducing DineMonkey

2008-08-20T18:06:00.004-04:00

Say hi to Charlie, he is our new mascot for DineMonkey.com

We're getting to the stage where the platform that we use for the DineSXM website is mature enough for licensing and worldwide deployment. Our idea is to enable independent operators to run locally owned businesses with a regional focus that allow guests to make restaurant reservations online.

Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Phuket, Darwin, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Ankara, Budapest, Barcelona, Madrid, Porto, Venice, Bruges, Strasbourg, Nantes, Nimes, Naples, Rome, Quito, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, yo I'm talking to you!

We thought long and hard about possible branding strategies and presented our evoked set to the PR company, which in turn did a few focus group sessions... - nah, forget that: all it took was about 10 minutes on Dotster. We'd rather leave it to the fat cats to waste energy on obvious stuff.

Without further ado: I am thrilled to present to you Charlie the DineMonkey!

Charlie is a bit cheeky, a lot of fun and loves good food. He represents the spirit of our company - we're definitely a bit unconventional and cheeky, love to do our innovative work in a fun and creative environment (hey, our office is on the beach), and definitely enjoy dining out. Charlie is also a bit irreverent, and ready to take on the world. We sure are too!

Welcome to the team Charlie!

TurboCharging the DineSXM reservations engine

2008-08-05T04:51:00.000-04:00

As DineSXM moves forward from its current Beta stage to an industry-strength restaurant reservations platform, the development team (ehm, that would be Norbie) keeps on working diligently to tweak performance, presentation and functionality in a way that makes the site more intuitive to use and better able to accept so-called "corner cases" like variations in opening-hours and meals served.

A good example to illustrate this would be a restaurant that's closed on Mondays, open for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner from Tuesday to Friday (all-day from 7am to 11pm), for Lunch and Dinner on Saturdays (12 Noon to 10pm) and open for Brunch and Dinner (from 10am until 2pm and from 5pm to 10pm) on Sundays.

Our original system allowed us to specify that a venue might have one or more fixed weekly closing days, and let us enter opening hours for various meal times such as Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner. Special opening or event hours: Late Night Dinner, Happy Hour, or Brunch would be noted separately but were not available for online booking. Also lacking was the ability to make single-day exceptions during a particular meal time if the restaurant is normally open on those hours. For example a restaurant that is open 7 days a week but closed for lunch on Sunday and Monday.

Out with the old

Having this drawback was something that we realized when we initially launched the site, and we made the decision to fix it before the high season. Now that we have more than 35 restaurants signed up for the service, we're much better able to prioritize improvements to the site. Providing a more accurate representation of opening hours, together with the ability to make bookings for each available slot has become an absolute must. Even with the season still being a few months away, this new functionality will make it far easier to accommodate special requirements. The image below shows a preview of (extremely) flexible opening hours that can be set with the new reservation engine.

In with the new

Of course, the changes to our presentation layer were derived from a new way of organizing our opening hours data so that it allows for flexible input. As a consequence of restructuring the database, we also had to overhaul the way in which the reservation engine handles availability queries and booking requests.

While we were at it, the alternate availability screen also received an update. Available booking times are now easier to see, and a second browsing option was added to navigate to an earlier or later time of day.

Alternate Booking Times

Being a lazy programmer (they're often said to be among the better ones), Norbie also devised a method to auto- update restaurant profiles with new opening hours whenever any of the other elements undergoes a manual update. This saves us a lot of work since most profiles do not require any changes and their old-style opening hours will simply keep working with the new reservation engine.

DineSXM just keeps getting better and better! Check it out at http://www.dinesxm.com

And people still use IE6...

2008-07-28T21:49:00.007-04:00

The "Beast of Redmond" has done it again.

In its infinite wisdom, Microsoft decided to push out an XP update on July 22 that caused the IE6 browser to stop displaying perfectly valid HTML pages while providing the visitor with a discomforting but otherwise totally useless "OPERATION ABORTED" error message. Here's what the message looked like when requesting the DineSXM home page from our development server:

Thanks to our alert visitors who emailed us after running into trouble, we tracked down the cause of this error and quickly developed a workaround. The DineSXM website is once again visible to users of Internet Explorer 6. Unfortunately, we did lose some traffic in the meantime, as is visible from this Google Analytics screen capture. Notice how, starting on Monday, the blue line drops from approximately 5.5 pages per visit to 1 while the orange line indicating the bounce rate jumps to 100% for users of IE6.

While troubleshooting, we determined that removing the Google Maps API JavaScript code made the site visible again, at the expense of not being able to view the DineSXM restaurant map. A quick read through the Google Maps forum told us that other webmasters were having similar trouble, but nothing directly related to what we were seeing here. We finally found a hint that helped us solve the problem on Crisp's blog at TweakBlogs.net

The blog post mainly deals with a major cock up by an anti-virus vendor, but also contains this nugget:

Now IE6 is known to treat <base> in a non-standard way: unless you explicitly close the <base>-tag (which doesn't have a closing-tag in HTML) all following elements are descendants of <base> instead of <head>. That's why we use this in our HTML:

HTML:
1
2
<base href="http://tweakimg.net/g/forum/templates/tweakers/">

Since our application server automatically adds a BASE tag to each page it generates, adding the second line of code was not much of an effort and magically made the site display properly once again. What remains frustrating of course is that with their most recent XP update, the developers at Microsoft once again show a complete lack of understanding and respect for standards compliance.

/end rant

DineSXM collateral improves guest satisfaction

2008-06-16T19:10:00.012-04:00

Last Saturday, the DineSXM team visited a newly opened restaurant in St. Maarten. Without reservations, we were very lucky to be seated and subsequently watched as many as a dozen groups be turned away during our visit.

In its first weekend of operation at a new location, the restaurant was packed. Many visitors had been curious to experience the venue's new ambiance and hospitality. I noticed a mix of local business people, island couples, AUC students, and a handful of tourists.

The two hosts looked a bit overwhelmed, as they were also tasked with managing the establishment at the same time. Each time new walk-in guests would be turned away, I heard the hosts suggest making a reservation next time. On a few occasions, the guest would then ask for a phone number, and I was happy to see the maître d' write it on the back of our DineSXM "Thank you for visiting" cards.

In a practical sense, those guests who had to be turned away represent a lost revenue of $2,500 or more on a single evening. Assuming that 60 percent was not given a phone number to book a future visit, I'd estimate that about $1,500 might now have been lost forever.

A professional restaurateur takes advantage of every opportunity to convert a guest who has to be turned away on a busy night into a happy customer the next time around. I honestly believe that it borders on the verge of arrogance to alienate potential guests, especially when they walk into your place of business with the intention to spend money right there and then.

Next to the issue of lost revenue I should also mention that dissatisfied customers will usually relate their experiences to nine times as many friends, compared to those who are happy about the service they received. As a restaurant manager or owner, such a fact would really give me a reason to worry! Resulting from the lack of preparation by its hosts, as many as five hundred people will possibly hear from guests who had to be turned away...

A little bit of forethought would have converted a large percentage of the lost customers into future guests, and would have resulted in minimizing the loss of revenue. Instead of simply saying that the restaurant was fully booked, the hosts could have given those lost customers a reason to return.

Having several DineSXM cards ready at the maître d’ table would be a good way to accomplish that. Each card could have been stamped with the restaurant's phone number on the back, and the offer of a premium or a discount to be given at the next visit. I imagine that the premium could be a free cocktail or glass of wine - at a cost of less than $5 for each person, or the discount be of equivalent value: for example 10% of the total check.

Notwithstanding my comments, I also have to be realistic in my critique and note that any newly opened business requires some time to establish best practices, fine tune its operational procedures and develop well-oiled routines. Food quality, menu selection, ambiance, and the ability of dining staff to take good care of their guests are obviously the restaurant’s main attraction. Both management and their staff were doing an exemplary job in those respects. I simply hope that my remarks will help it to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

DineSXM cards are being distributed among St. Maarten and St. Martin's most popular restaurants. Next to presenting the cards together with a guest's check, they can also be used to promote the making of a reservation among walk-in guests who can't be seated on a busy night. I'd like to suggest that restaurateurs prepare these ahead of time by printing the restaurant's phone number on the back of the card. A premium or discount, redeemable at their next visit can be added as a gesture of appreciation.

Restaurant brochure ready for printing

2008-05-29T01:45:00.003-04:00

Some of our friends had offered to put us in touch with owners and managers of St. Maarten / St. Martin dining establishments, and asked us to give them some collateral that explains what DineSXM is all about.

Designed to give restaurateurs a quick overview of what DineSXM has to offer and the major benefits of signing up for our online restaurant reservation system, our restaurant brochure is now ready for printing.

You can download the PDF for a preview of what our restaurant brochure will look like when it comes back from the printer's in a few weeks time.

UPDATE 6/17/2008: Based on feedback from restaurant owners and DineSXM friends, we decided to go for a more direct approach and rewrote most of the brochure text. Click the link in the previous paragraph to download the new version.

A handsome foursome!

2008-05-13T06:37:00.004-04:00

After last month's unfortunate restaurant closings, we're happy to report that four great places to dine have just been added to DineSXM.com - they're: A Taste of Bliss, Le Montmartre, La Guinguette, and Jo's Steakhouse.

Each one of this handsome quartet offers something unique; from the poolside dining and Q's excellent sushi at A Taste of Bliss, to the tranquil ambiance and French-styled menu at La Guinguette, to the established and GaultMillau rated Le Montmartre and a veritable newcomer - Jo's Steakhouse - the cozy dockside venue with lots of ambition.

These new additions bring our count of DineSXM restaurants up to 30 - we're getting back on track! While we continued to improve the usability of our dining reservation website by adding slideshows to restaurant profiles and the ability to search for venues by name, our promotional cards came back from the printer's and are now ready to be distributed among a selection of participating establishments.

A bit surprising, but strengthening our idea that we're on to a good thing, is how fast we have gained popularity in the search engines: Google now puts us in the top 20 for terms like restaurant reservations and dining reservations, and first page results for most SXM restaurant related searches - pretty amazing when you know that the site is barely 3 months old. Even the bare "sxm" keyword puts us in the top 50!

Much more surprising is that there's very little awareness out there of the benefits that DineSXM can provide for restaurateurs on the Friendly Island. As I have mentioned before, every restaurant on St. Maarten and St. Martin can profile their venue online at no cost. I have seen some directories out there charge as much as $640 a year for a tiny profile and a single thumbnail image. There are no upfront fees associated with joining DineSXM and no long term commitment is necessary, only a small fee for each booking that is made through our reservation engine.

As soon as 50 restaurants have joined, we will start charging a reasonable sign-up fee to cover our expenses. DineSXM, "Get us while we're hungry!"

Winning hearts and minds

2008-04-25T15:21:00.004-04:00

DineSXM has been getting a lot of link love lately. It really gives me a good feeling to see that something I stand for and am proud of to be working on is receiving attention and positive feedback. Thank you Candee, Jess, Eliza and Filiberto: your blog posts on DineSXM made my day.

It feels good to be popular, especially because I know that many of the restaurants that we feature on DineSXM will need the extra promotion in order to survive the low season. Again, one of our recently added restaurants: Le Pink Pot (formerly St. Germain) has had to close its doors. This following the earlier closure of Le Gaiac on the Marigot Waterfront.

Both restaurants were located on the French side of our island. The free-fall of the US Dollar against the Euro, coupled with a recession in our main tourism markets and the upcoming low season does not bode well for restaurants located in Marigot, Grand Case, Orient Bay, Oyster Pond and other places on the French side of St. Maarten / St. Martin.

Here at DineSXM, we'll keep doing our best to promote our family of restaurants. Hopefully, we'll be able to do so by creating enough buzz on the "interwebs" and with off-line promotions for which we're currently printing collateral.

Meanwhile, I'll keep my confidence! Especially when seeing things like this:

Oh, almost forgot: if you own or manage a restaurant on either side of the island, consider joining us. Or, if you know someone who does: tell them about DineSXM! While we're still in beta, restaurants can join at no cost, as long as they provide us with a table allotment so that we can take online reservations for their establishment.

DineSXM site updates

2008-04-09T17:11:00.002-04:00

Since the last post we've put some effort in making sure that all DineSXM restaurant profiles contain relevant restaurant descriptions. The following profiles have been updated: Peg Leg Pub and Steakhouse, French Touch, La Petite Auberge des Iles, Tutta Pasta, The Stone, The Boathouse and Picante.

Many more sites are now linking to DineSXM, including several St. Maarten / St. Martin directories, and the ever popular Orient Beach Forums.

The first DineSXM recipe went online recently, courtesy of Sopranos Restaurant in Maho, and we posted news updates in our Articles and Tips section on Peg Leg's reopening at Port de Plaisance Resort. The site has been expanded with a related links directory, with hand-picked web resources on St. Maarten and St. Martin.

DineSXM - May we take your reservation?

New promotional campaign

2008-03-26T21:15:00.005-04:00

We have decided to put in some extra effort in promoting the DineSXM website, and have started a banner ad campaign with the good folks of TravelTalkOnline.com.

The banner will be in rotation on their St. Maarten / St. Martin travel forums. TTOL is a great source of information for travellers. Most regular posters who answer questions either reside on the island or are frequent visitors.

Los Gauchos now on DineSXM.com

2008-03-25T01:50:00.006-04:00

I promise that I won't make it a habit to blog about each new addition to the DineSXM family of restaurants, but I have to say something about the way in which our latest participant, Los Gauchos Argentine Grill came on board. WOW! Liesa, you're a gem!

A few weeks ago, one of our visitors submitted a request to add the restaurant - as it is one of her favorites. I contacted Liesa, Los Gauchos' owner, by email that night to see if they were interested and possibly schedule a meeting... ...and received an almost instant positive reply! But, due to both of our busy schedules (Liesa having committed to organize a fundraiser and my calendar including a romantic long weekend on Anguilla), we couldn't set our meeting any earlier than today.

To make a long story short: not only did Los Gauchos agree to join our site and was our questionnaire completed on the spot, but by 9pm tonight I was in the possession of a restaurant description, menu highlights and several high-res pictures of the restaurant. An hour later, I had published the profile for the world to see. We're now set to receive reservations for Los Gauchos: the winner of the Daily Herald "Best Steakhouse" award in 2005 and 2007.

Joining DineSXM is free for restaurants while we're still in beta. To quote Los Gauchos' owner: "Any restaurateur who doesn't see the benefit of this is nuts!". I can't do much else but wholeheartedly agree: especially after hearing so much talk lately about how badly restaurants on this island are hurting. DineSXM gives every restaurant on St. Maarten and St. Martin the opportunity to display their establishment online at no cost. There is only a small fee for each booking, but any SXM restaurant can take advantage of the free promotion that we offer - No cure, no pay: it doesn't get any simpler than this...

We're one month old!

2008-03-11T02:25:00.004-04:00

St. Maarten / St. Martin's newest restaurant guide and reservation site DineSXM.com is now one month old. We (John, Vanessa and me) opted for a quiet launch, but one of the people who we had invited to preview the site could not resist the temptation... ...and wrote about us on a travel forum. Result: several hundred unique visitors a day in our first week of operation! Thankfully we passed our first, unannounced, fire test.

As expected, some of the forum readers commented that we still have a long way to go when it comes to representing the estimated 400 restaurants on our island. Well, yeah - thank you for stating the obvious, sir! DineSXM now features 26 participating restaurants. Regretfully, we already had to remove one that closed. In the meantime there also have been staff and management changes at a handful of places who had agreed to sign up: basically that means we'll have to start over with the new people in charge.

Quite a bit of work has to be done before a restaurant can be featured on the DineSXM.com website: they must give us a table allotment, complete a four page questionnaire so that we can categorize their venue in an useful way, send us pictures (or let us take them), write an intro text, give us their menu, and so on.... So, all in all I think 26 establishments is not too shabby. In the next months, we're looking to add at least two new venues each week.

All of these restaurants accept advance table reservations through the site. What's more: everything on the back end has been working rather flawlessly so far! There were no double-bookings, reserved tables are being blocked off, cancellations get processed correctly, the right time and date alternatives are presented when a table is not available, site registration, booking confirmation, review reminders and status reports are all mailed automatically without a hitch, the site simply works as intended!

Let's not forget the most important part: people are signing up, making reservations and enjoying the site! They're also using the favorite restaurants personalization feature, sending our url to their friends, suggesting restaurants, using our Google Maps mashup to locate a venue, and otherwise interacting with the website and with us. This is the kind of stuff that makes me very very happy as a webmaster.

And, there was something else that made me happy: Google, Yahoo, and MSN are busy indexing the site, and have already brought us some little gems like st maarten restaurants in the top five search results. Everything looks very promising, apart from a little overzealousness on the part of Google trying to index non-existent pages because of a misplaced redirection on my part - but that has been fixed and we're back on track. Even searches for specific restaurants now bring up our site among the first few results. All of this means great exposure and free publicity for any of our restaurants, whether visitors book through the site or simply show up...

We have also started talking to some hotel / resort managers and inbound tour-operators. They just "loooooove" DineSXM... Having many bookable restaurants all together on one website will save their concierge and activity desks a lot of time and phone costs when making reservations for their guests. By being first to market, we gain exclusivity within those sales channels: this gives our participating restaurants yet another very valuable reason to join.

During our beta period, restaurants can join at no cost, as long as they provide us with a table allotment so that we can take online reservations for their establishment. As soon as we reach our threshold, there will be an initial charge to cover set-up costs. It's a really a no-brainer: joining DineSXM is beneficial to both restaurants and their guests, to hotels and resorts as well as the rest of our tourism industry, and it will be helpful to keep St. Maarten / St. Martin on the map as a top tourism destination and the Culinary Capital of the Caribbean.

We like to say that DineSXM is St. Maarten / St. Martin's ultimate restaurant reservations and dining guide. And it's more than just marketing talk, we believe in what we're doing and are working hard to make it a fact.

May we take your reservation?

- Norbert

			Le Cottage	4
			Mario's Bistro	4
			Pineapple Pete's	4
			Spiga	4
			Big Fish	3
			La Gondola	3
			L'Escapade	3
			Mark's Place	3
			Sol e Luna	3
			Yvette's	3