At some point, I re-posted somebody’s cool photo of whale sharks, and captioned it, “And we can take you there!” Nadia was immediately interested and we started a conversation that quickly turned into planning a big dive trip together. We decided that the trip will include diving in Cozumel for one day, diving cenotes in Playa-del-Carmen for the next day, diving Underwater Museum in Cancun for the third day, and the grand finale on the fourth day will be snorkeling with whale sharks. It sounded “epic” – Nadia’s termJ - and she kept saying it was a dream trip. So we named it Dream Extreme.
The itinerary sounded great, but we needed to assemble a group of divers to make it possible cost-wise (we agreed that she’d dive in exchange for professional videos that she was planning to take for her website and professional photos). The problem was that we had only 3 weeks to promote it and the price of the trip per person was $750 for only 4 days (and that’s not including accommodations or air fare)… I totally didn’t expect any success with this endeavor this year – I thought, it’s OK, let me find good partners for all the locations (Playa, Cancun, etc.) and figure out all the costs and logistics so that we can easily arrange it for next year. But…
IT WORKED! In only 3 weeks we had a group of 8 people! Some came through Facebook, some through friend’s recommendation, some just planned to come dive to Cozumel during those dates, but I diverted them into this trip instead. I was stunned by how easily everybody agreed to pay this money – it’s so good to know that people actually value personalized service when they don’t have to lift a finger or worry about anything – everything is arranged for them, all the transportation, lunches, schedule, etc. We decided that I should go with them on the entire trip to make sure everything goes well and take care of any issues that may arise, basically, to be their “concierge service”. We put a lot of work into the promotion, but it was so worth it!
This trip is yet another proof for me that social networking is an amazing tool in business nowadays. In addition to all the trip participants, I also met an absolutely great partner for our cenotes and whale sharks activities – Eduardo from Cancun. He is Mexican, but of this rare breed that actually responds to emails and is very proactive and super helpful. The big reason why our dive shop is going to be a big success soon is our customer service. In this country, most business owners display strangely negligent behavior as far as communication with customers is concerned. For example, I wanted to take a sailfish excursion in Cancun in January. So I emailed the guy – still waiting for his response… Also, wanted to take a yoga instructor course in March, and it’s a lot of money - $3,000 - but apparently nobody cares about getting any money from me… This is very weird and outrageous to me, but nobody here seems to be bothered by it – “it is what it is, what are you going to do, such is life”.
So when Eduardo responded to my first email within a couple of hours from his iPad, I was slightly shocked. My surprise increased when I opened the email and read through amazingly coherent and detailed answers to each of my questions (usually, if you are lucky to get any response, it barely covers one topic you are interested in, so you have to be careful and ask only concise questions in a whole serious of short emails, otherwise – total failure of communication is guaranteed). I knew right away that we can partner with him for the project! When we finally met on the trip in Playa-del-Carmen, he said the same thing – that he was very pleased with my emails and that’s why he decided to work with us and give us great prices and possibly expand our relationship beyond the scope of this project into the diving he wants to do in Cozumel. Wow, the power of the written word…J
Anyway, a lot of great things have actually come out of our very first organized trip-excursion:
- We found great partners in Yucatan to make more amazing excursions possible for our clients, ensuring the highest level of service and good prices.
- We made great connections with all the divers who joined this trip, and all of them plan to return to Cozumel in the near future.
- We will get 5 professional videos about every activity we did on this trip. Those videos will be published on www.youtube.com, www.scubadiverlife.com, www.vimeo.com, Facebook, Twitter, doing some unquestionable good for our exposure.
- We were interviewed by Scuba Diver Life and are now able to spread the word about Cozumel diving and Dive Cooperative vision.
- We will get some professional photos that we can turn into posters for our dive shop.
- We did make some profit.
- It generated some interest even before the big exposure that we'll get soon through all the videos, and we are already planning the same trip with a UK free-diving photographer for next summer!
I’m more and more fascinated with the opportunities social networking presents us with nowadays. I feel that it’s actually much easier now to meet the “right” people than it used to be back in the day when you had to go to different functions to “schmooze”. Of course, people do it now too, but a lot has shifted into the online space and it opens up new doors, includes people who don’t really like to schmooze and would never go to a function and may be shy to even talk to you in person, but online they feel free, safe and unstoppable. Thank God for Mark Zuckerberg!
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