Restaurant Map for St. Maarten and St. Martin

(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....
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Business is bad? Let's blame someone else!

(Subtitle: rearranging the deck chairs at Kiwi Café)


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

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DineSXM Info for Restaurant Owners

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.

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

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

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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 on Facebook

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.

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

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.


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

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.


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404 Error: Restaurant not found - Part III

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.


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404 Error: Restaurant not found - Part II

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...

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How is your restaurant getting by?

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?


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

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?"

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Crystal Pineapple Awards 2008 - Vote for DineSXM

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.


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DineSXM earns Google Sitelinks

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.

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Hurricane Omar Photos - St. Maarten

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.
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DineSXM in the news

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.

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New for St. Maarten: Dinner Reservations Online

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.


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Get dining reviews on your blog!

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.

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Restaurant brochure ready for printing

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.

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