Benchmark survey of Destination Websites - Part 2

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.

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Benchmark survey of Destination Websites - Part 1

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.
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DineSXM Restaurant profiles "I18n"

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.

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Introducing DineMonkey

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.

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TurboCharging the DineSXM reservations engine

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.

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