SAMOA: Seabreeze Resort – Finding a new path to post-pandemic success

Over the last two years, a series of dominoes fell for resort owners Wendy and Chris Booth. At the start of the pandemic, they found themselves unable to return to their Samoan home and business. Their long-standing manager of the beautiful and exclusive Seabreeze Resort returned to the UK to be with family, and a new manager was appointed. Sadly, this is where it all went wrong. 

Unable to closely monitor activities back home, the resort fell into ruin despite salaries continuing to be paid in their absence. On their release from managed isolation in September 2021, Wendy and Chris were shocked and heartbroken to find all equipment – refrigeration, hot water, lighting – corroded and seized up from not having been turned on regularly. Overgrown gardens had rotted wooden steps; bed frames and wooden furniture had succumbed irretrievably to mould. 

The scheduled programme of maintenance simply hadn’t been adhered to. It was so sad to see so much damage to our special property,” says Wendy.

It was clear Seabreeze Resort on the beautiful south coast of Upolu needed a complete makeover and so savings were again ploughed into the property to prepare for the borders reopening – originally expected to be April 2022, but that has been abandoned due to the spread of the virus in Samoa and there is now no scheduled date. Another blow to the Booths and many other resort owners across the Pacific Islands. 

With the property repairs and new equipment and furniture using every last tala, serious savings were going to have to be made in day to day running costs once guests returned. With chefs deployed to garden duty and housemaids to cleaning, human resources are already stretched. The exodus of young men to fruit picking in New Zealand and Australia has caused headaches for resort owners, especially when heavy coconuts are hanging loose and there is nobody with the skills to climb up and safely knock them down!

Being alerted to the Adaptation Grants offered by Business Link Pacific through the Samoa Hotel Association, Wendy set about downloading templates and applied. The grant was used for search engine optimisation (SEO) for the resort website, and after much searching digital marketing organisation Online Asset Partners – OAP – based in New Zealand was selected to carry out the work. Wendy cannot speak highly enough of David Cranwell’s dedication and innovativeness.

On hearing about the delay in the borders opening, David’s first thought was to come up with ways to keep the website on page one of the search engines without spending more money.”

The reason Seabreeze wanted to improve its SEO was to get more traffic to its website and to do that they needed to learn to market the resort in-house.

 

It is a small resort, just 13 rooms, with many customers returning year after year. If the borders open in the next few months, we are confident that we will be able to generate full occupancy once again when we get fully up and running.”

While they are still in a holding pattern, Seabreeze has no plans to give up.

This SEO has been a steep learning curve for me and I’m grateful to BLP for providing the funds to enable us to use an organisation like OAP. We are in a better position to succeed now, so that is a great comfort to Chris and myself.”

ENDS

The Finance Facility enables access to capital for stabilisation, recovery and growth of viable but financially distressed businesses in the Pacific Islands due to the impact of COVID-19 on the regional economy. 

The Facility opened applications to Business Adaptation Grants across eight Pacific Island countries in January and June 2021. Adaptation Grants have benefitted over 200 businesses to date, and Business Link Pacific is currently processing a similar number of grants to be disbursed before the end of the year. 

To further support recovery and growth, Business Link Pacific is negotiating key partnerships with Financial Institutions to offer concessionary lending to small businesses in the region and will soon make information available on accessing those products. The Finance Facility also offers curated information about financial products for businesses on its free online tool, the Finance Finder; visit today to find out what is available to your business right now.