When I first arrived in California I was lucky enough to have a friend help me get started hunting. He turned me on to what has become my favorite blacktail hunting area, and also showed me some excellent duck hunting on and off of the refuge system. But the one thing that we never had the chance to do was hunt pigs.
“If you really want to hunt pigs in California,” he told me, “you’ll need to hire a guide.”
Instead, I stubbornly devoted several years to hunting public land. I learned some areas and hunted them hard and diligently. As a reward, I found lots of sign and even had brief sightings of a couple of pigs. I never fired a shot.
So began the process of locating and securing my first guided hunt. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, and it was really a crazy process. As it turned out, I got lucky and didn’t get ripped off. As it also turned out, despite the guide’s ads and the fact that I’d inquired about a deer/hog combination hunt, the guided hunt I ended up going on had nothing to do with hogs.
I expect that my experience wasn’t that different from a lot of hunters who are looking to book their first hunts. I read a lot of ads in the back of local hunting magazines (the Web was still coming into its own as a resource), and made a whole lot of phone calls… many of which resulted in leaving lots of voice messages. The process took a lot of time, and any guide who didn’t return my calls got scratched from my list.
The problem is, there are an awful lot of guides who don’t advertise. Maybe they can’t afford to advertise, or maybe they don’t know how to take out an ad. Some get enough traffic through word-of-mouth and repeat customers that they don’t really need to put out ads. The Internet has done a lot for both hunters and guides by providing an easy-to-use platform for guides to offer their wares, and a relatively easy way for hunters to search for them. However, there are still a lot of guides and outfitters out there who haven’t yet learned to utilize the Internet or simply don’t want anything to do with worrying about setting up websites, much less getting into social media.
So how does a hunter find a guide? What if you could just go to a central website, enter the criteria of your hunt, and have qualified guide services come to you?
That’s exactly what Huntandfishguides.com is all about. The idea behind the site is to connect hunters with guides in a fairly unique way. The hunter simply enters some basic criteria:
- Where do you want to hunt?
- What species do you want to hunt?
- When do you want to hunt?
- How many hunters will be in your party?
Once you’ve entered the data, you’ll get a listing of guides that match your criteria. On top of that, you’ll get quotes emailed to you directly from guides who can offer what you’re looking for. Once the guides have made contact, you can follow up with them to discuss details, get references, and answer questions about their services.
For guides, it’s free to register with the site. You pay a small fee for each lead that’s sent to you. It’s up to you to close the deal with the prospective clients by following up quickly.
Hunt and Fish Guides dot com is a brand new site, and still in the very early stages of rolling out. If you go over to check them out right now, you won’t find a ton of listings. That’s yet to come. For now, we’re sort of wondering what you folks out there, the potential customers and guides/outfitters think about the idea.
So do tell. As a hunter looking for guided hunts, would you use a service like this? How about any of you who are guides or outfitters… would you be interested in a site that sends you leads on hunters?
The floor is open.
