Captain makes being a guide simple by taking all the administrative, marketing, customer outreach, and payment burdens off your chest. We believe that fresh air is good for the soul, and taking a break from busy schedules to get out on the water or in the field can be the highlight of each customer's month. It’s our goal to Unlock the Outdoors for everyone by making it easy to find the right guide and the right trip, book it, and head out with you, one of our Damn Good Guides. Learn more about our story here.
We here at Captain are committed to helping your business and bringing you more trips. We are long-term, relationship-first partners that are committed to getting you out of the office.
You create your profile and trips based on how you want to run your business, there are no fees ever, and you confirm every trip so there is no risk of double bookings. We operate our site as a meritocracy rather than a pay-to-play ecosystem - if you provide a good experience to customers and keep your calendar up to date, you’ll rise to the top of the list for your area and get more bookings.
We’re also only a phone call or text away to help you with whatever you need.
Fielding calls and texts all day isn’t fun for anyone, especially while you have a customer with you. And managing an online presence can be challenging; it’s costly and time consuming to create websites, pamphlets, and other marketing material, and often when someone calls to book a trip, they want to go out on popular weekend days, meaning you frequently have to turn down trip requests due to scheduling conflicts.
We have worked to solve these fundamental issues in the process of booking a trip. Customers are able to search the website to find trips that meet their criteria and dates, compare and contrast different trips, book within seconds, and show up with a great understanding of who they are meeting and what they will be doing. You can focus on showing the customer a good time knowing we take care of all the administrative work.
Because we don’t charge any fees for our service, we only get paid when you get paid, so it is in our best interests to send you as many quality customers as we can. Our job is to get as many customers to view (and book) your trip listings as possible.
There are 5 ways to get more bookings on the site:
We made our calendar so you can block dates in one click and update the calendar in a minute or less. You have the ability to edit multiple listings at once, make custom date blocks, block out partial and whole days, and more. We allow you to confirm or decline every trip we send, but every time you update your calendar you get a boost in the rankings, so keeping things up to date will help you earn more trips.
Customers are able to see your trip listing by searching for trips in your area and filtering by availability, target species, capacity, and more. How you appear in the ranking is determined by good reviews and keeping an up-to-date calendar. We also give a slight boost to new guides so they can get their first trip with us and start to build their presence.
We use a combination of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, partnerships in the outdoors and travel space, events and trade shows, events, and email marketing. In short, we are trying to get your trips in front of as many potential customers as possible. The best thing you can do to help market your trips is to send in fishing reports. The better quality stories and pictures you share with us, the more we’re able to promote you and your trips in these channels.
You can make updates to your listings directly by logging into your account, going to 'Listed Trips' in the menu, and clicking 'Edit' on the trip you want to change.
You can find app download instructions here.
The day of the trip, the customer will show you a QR code (kind of like a mobile boarding pass) - just scan that QR code before you head out using your phone's camera, just like scanning the QR code menu at a restaurant. This will automatically transfer full payment to your bank account minus our commission, and we tell the customer to bring 20% cash for a tip.
To receive payment directly to your bank account you’ll use our payment system, Stripe, which is PCI Level 1 certified, the most stringent level of payment certification. Stripe is the same system used by Uber, Lyft, Under Armour, Booking.com, and more. You'll need to set up payment details just once by going to the 'Payment Info' section of your guide portal.
We also let you set your own deposit and cancellation policies. If the customer cancels the trip at the last minute, we will send the entire deposit (which you can set to any amount) to your bank account.
We purposefully don’t include business names on our trip listings to avoid any competition with customers searching for you directly online.
We launched the website in 2020 in our home state of Texas, and have since been expanding to meet growing demand around the Gulf of Mexico, up the Atlantic Coast, and across the rest of the US and Central America.
Head to our guide sign up page to get started and become a Damn Good Guide!