04 - “The first booking that came in was not our first guest. It was very surprising.”

It was not easy to register the apartments on the Airbnb and Booking.com platforms. There's a little more to it than you might think. You have to fill in a lot of information, you have to have the right photos, you have to have the bank details, you have to go through all kinds of inspections and verifications and then your page has to be arranged to your taste. A big job! But the time had come, everything was registered and everything was official. We were online!

The next day I received a message on my Whatsapp from an American number. “Hello, I would like to rent your apartment. What's the availability?” I had two thoughts at the time. The first was, wow, it's really started now. The second was: how did this potential customer get my number? After asking some questions I understood that he got my number from a good friend of ours who owns the best Kitesurf school in Ilha do Sal: Sal Surf Camp School. It didn't take long for the first booking was completed. What's special is that our first booking did not come in via one of the platforms we had put so much effort into. No, the first booking came from our direct network! Great, but surprising. On July 25, our first guest would enter the Goldan Sand Suite and stay for 16 nights.

We thought that the guest from America would be our first real guest, but it turned out differently. A day later, in the morning, we received our first official booking via Airbnb. “Congratulations, Stacey has reserved with you for 4 nights from August 19 – August 23”. The best text message I've ever received. Another customer from America. That same day we received another booking through Airbnb. This time it was Jeffrey from the Netherlands. The spell was broken. From that moment on we received bookings every day. But Laurie and Hugo's suddenly made it very real. They booked on July 22 and wanted in immediately. The very first real customers! We quickly arranged everything, and they walked into the Crystal Wave Suite less than two hours later.

In the end they had a nice stay and we were very satisfied hosts. I think the moral of this story is: “Even if you think you know how it will turn out. You never know for sure.”