First of all, to be clear; instructors who work for ski schools can sign up, we just don’t allow the ski school themselves to have an account.
When we set out to create a marketplace for ski instructors and their customers, we had two things in mind; to solve common problems for ski instructors, such as struggling to find new clients and to create a great product that is easy and simple for all users.
Knowing that independent ski instructors are facing the brunt of the internet revolution was at the forefront of our minds. Currently every independent ski instructor needs their own online presence; it is the number 1 supply route for new business and if you aren’t active online, ensuring you have good SEO (search engine optimisation) and a decent marketing budget for “Adwords” etc. new business is going to become harder and harder to come by.
The good news is that more and more instructors are investing in their websites and realise its’ importance, the bad news is that the more websites there are, the more time customers must spend searching through Google/Bing/Yahoo etc. resulting in a lot of frustration. Ultimately this plays in to the hands of larger ski schools, as customers will just book lessons online, with whomever is located on the upper part of the first page of the search results.
Allowing ski schools to advertise themselves would undermine our overall ambition of increasing work for independent instructors.
We created Maison Sport to help independent ski instructors and enable them to not just continue working for themselves but increase the amount they earn, whilst making it simple for customers to find and book them. Therefore, we decided that allowing ski schools to advertise themselves would undermine our overall ambition of increasing work for independent instructors.
We also strongly believe in the benefits of the client booking directly with the ski instructor and then leaving a review for the instructors afterwards — this is something that is difficult to achieve if a ski school were to be listed.
It should be financially viable for every ski instructor to work for themselves, let’s make sure this is still a possibility for many years to come.
If you like what you have read check out Maison Sport at www.maisonsport.com