I grew up in the Caribbean, in St. Martin, and I basically grew up on a boat. My parents sailed our 43-foot sailboat from South Africa to the islands, so being on the water has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
When we settled, my parents started a charter and tour company called Eagle Tours. Today it is one of the top operators in St. Maarten - more than five boats, running tours and charters across St. Maarten, Anguilla, and St. Barts. I grew up working in that business. I started as a deckhand. Then a first mate. Then a captain, running cruise ship excursions and hotel-guest charters out to the beaches, the reefs, and the neighboring islands.
So I know an operator's day from the inside. The early crew brief. The activity desk that calls at 8:55am about a guest they "definitely told you about yesterday." The weather day. The Saturday where everything has to go right. None of that is theory to me. I have cleaned the boat at the end of it.
In 2012 I launched a website called SXM Deals. Simple idea: let a tourist book any tour in St. Maarten from one place. This was early - there really weren't many sites doing this back then. The problem was that almost no tour operator had a booking system. Most of them had nothing at all.
The site grew, and so did my problem. Every online booking I took, I had to forward to the operator and wait for a confirmation. Some got back to me in five minutes. Others took forever - because a lot of these are one-man shows. They run the boat all day, they come back, they clean it, they eat, and they go to bed.
Then one booking broke me. A big one. A lot of money on the table. I didn't want to take the guest's payment without a confirmation from the operator. And the operator just never answered. It took something like two days. Two days. The guests booked something else and I lost the whole thing. That should have taken two minutes. It's just stupid, and that was the trigger.
So I went around to every tour company owner I knew and asked: what if we built one system that connects all of you to the agents, the hotel activity desks, and websites like mine? Everyone was interested. The top four tour companies on the island came in as investors, and in 2016 we built the first version of Junglebee.
Today Junglebee processes more than $4 million in bookings a year for tour and charter operators across the Caribbean. The second big breakthrough was payments. Unlike the mainland, most of the Caribbean has no Stripe and no PayPal that actually connects to local banks. So even when I could build an operator a booking widget, there was often no way to take a card on it.
That's why we built JB Pay, our own card processing system. An operator anywhere in the Caribbean can sign up, give us some basic company details, sign an agreement, and start taking card payments on their own website. And the money pays out to their local bank, on their island. I have watched it transform real companies. Aquamania was a huge, well-run operation that ran entirely on paper - we digitized the whole thing. Eagle Tours digitized the entire company, and their growth skyrocketed.
I write the stuff I'd have wanted to read back when I was on the operator side of the desk. What booking software actually costs at real volume, once you count the fees and the OTA splits and the hours your office manager spends fixing things. How to take a card payment in a region the big processors ignore. How to handle a one-star review without making it worse. What to actually check before you start a tour business on a specific island. Real operations, from someone who has run the boat - not marketing.
If you run a tour or charter business and want to swap notes, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn or by email at michael@junglebee.com.
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