destinations. We purchased many domain names relating to our business and used them as landing and redirect pages for our main page. We were using SEO [Search engine optimization] before it became a trend. Our web- master Kevin
Esty has done a great job on our website.
Wehave recently addedonline reservations fromonourwebsite and partnered with booking companies such as Booking.com, Expedia, and TripAdvisor. This has greatly increased our global presence, and we are starting the 2017 season with some of our best pre-season reservation counts ever. Our Facebook page was started about six years ago, but it was not heavily focused-on until 2012 when our son Jess and his wife Amy returned to Brier Island to work at the Lodge. They took over the social media side of the business and between them have created multiple channels of social media. Amy is a creative and avid photographer and her ideas, images, and stories have attracted many followers to our business and area. Amy saw that the Island as a whole was underrepresented in social media, so she created Facebook pages for locations like the lighthouse, which at the time had no funding for promotions. She’s continued sharing content
earlier, two of my siblings had removed the bones from a 60 tonne humpback for the Ontario Science Centre. It is quite a site and I felt like I could do more or less the same for my guests. I took a faster approach than the conven- tional way which is to bury the carcass for up-to two years, then extract the bones. I hired a young gentleman here on the island – the only one willing, actually – and we more or less flayed the whale and extracted the bones. They came out very clean and very usable. Sometime later, I saw some footage online from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of biology students disman- tling a whale’s carcass in the same manner that I did it. I kept them in the sun for only a year to dry them out and then moved them inside to a storage area during the off- season so that the elements didn’t damage them too much. But the smell of the whale oil wasn’t completely gone and it made for quite the cleanup. But there is now a whale skull in the lounge where you check-in. When you walk-in, you walk between the jawbones, and all the ribs and vertebrae are on display in the restaurant and lounge. You’re connected to the sea everywhere you look and travel on Brier Island. It is also home to three lighthouses, includ- ing the beautiful and historic Western Light and the Peter Island lighthouse, which is off the Island in Grand Passage. How has the internet changed the way you do business? VT: When Brier Island Lodge started, the only thing that was online was the bedsheets. As the access to the internet grew, we got online very early compared to most tourism
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