Depending on the Internet to “Get Away from it All.”
Our family is on a quest to find the perfect retirement spot. Even though we’re still a few decades away from that, we figure we better start early because our requirements are specific and numerous: proximity to great fishing lakes, in a town with charm and culture, where 30 degrees Fahrenheit is about the coldest nighttime temperature we need to worry about. If this place exists, there are certainly lots of other people who’ve already discovered it, so we want to stake our spot as soon as we find it.
Towards our quest, we’ve spent our last two summer vacations at lakefront resorts that were previously unknown to us, but which we found on the Internet. The first, in Leesburg, Alabama, is called Chesnut Bay Resort. It is a small, but growing, planned community of about three dozen single family homes on a lovely point of Lake Weiss. Most of the homes are privately owned; the Chesnut Bay property management team takes care of weekly rentals, and also manages a whole host of amenities that the owners and renters can share. During our week there, we took advantage of the beautiful pool, the free kayaks and paddle boats, the 100-foot water slide, playground areas and even an outdoor amphitheater, where they played family-friendly movies each night after sunset.
This year, we traveled to Table Rock Lake, and found a similar resort in West Branson, Missouri. Stillwaters Resort is much larger than Chesnut Bay, with about eight or 10 buildings spread out across a cove on Indian Point, and probably two or three dozen units per building. It too has great amenities, including a marketplace, a marina offering boat and jetski rentals, free kayaks, three pools and a large picnic area. Like Chesnut Bay, it has a boat ramp and convenient guest docks for our fishing boat. Also like Chesnut Bay, it seems to have a healthy mix of guests who are repeat visitors as well as new guests who learned about Stillwaters Report online.
When we found the place on Lake Weiss, we felt we had hit the jackpot, especially since we had just “happened” upon it online. So when this year’s accommodations were equally perfect for our vacation objective, we realized how important the Internet is for helping people find travel destinations. Certainly on lakes as commercially-developed as Table Rock Lake, there is more than one ideal family get-away with similar activities for families. As we drove around the lake both by car and by boat, we realized very few of the other resorts we passed had turned up in any of our Internet searches. And as a result, we spent our vacation dollars at the place that used the Internet most effectively.
And of note for the travel industry, online marketing doesn’t just create customers who find you online — it can also turn into a chain of valuable referrals. Our family has already told dozens of other families we know about both of our lucky finds, showing that word of mouth advertising is still very important, as long as you can find something worth talking about.