They booked the villa. Now they need a chef
Villa guests look for their private chef days before they land. Here is the website that turns that Sunday night search into a booking instead of a commission.
A family of six has signed for a villa in Gustavia, two weeks in December. They booked the villa eight months ago. The chef, they are looking for right now, on a Sunday night, from a sofa in Boston.
They type "private chef st barts". They find two international platforms, three Instagram accounts without a single price, and a Facebook page whose last post is from March. They will write to whoever gives them a clear answer first, not to the best cook on the island.
What kind of website does a private chef or caterer in St Martin or St Barts need?
A short, bilingual site that answers three questions before anything else: what you cook, what it costs, and whether you are free on their dates. Everything else, your training, your plates, your reviews, confirms a decision that is already forming. It does not start one.
This is the blind spot of the trade. A chef assumes the website is there to tell the story of the food. The guest is comparing you against a booking platform, with a budget already spent on the rental and the flights. They are looking for something to decide with.
Your menus, with the prices on them
This is the most uncomfortable and the most profitable decision. A menu without prices forces the visitor to write to you just to find out whether they can afford you, and most of them will not: they go back to the platform, which shows a per person rate.
Three named menus, a price per guest, what it includes (the shopping, the service, the washing up) and what it does not. You lose the browsers who were never in your range, and that is the point: the conversations you do get are with people who have already accepted the price. A dated, seasonal menu built around whatever the boats brought in beats a frozen catalogue you will never dare to update.
Say what you do not do, too. "I do not cook for more than twelve" or "I work on the French side only" saves you ten dead-end conversations a season.
Your photos sell, as long as they show up
A chef has good pictures by default. The trap is publishing all of them, full size, straight from the phone. Your visitor is in Boston or London, on a site hosted far away from them: on a typical shared European host, 6 to 8 seconds of waiting is normal from Miami. Photos sell nothing until they appear.
One strong image per section, resized and compressed, beats a gallery of forty. And one readable plate, framed, shot in daylight, beats a whole blurry table under a flash. We set out the method in our piece on photos that sell without slowing the site down.
Dates: the question nobody publishes
That is the structural advantage of the platforms: they show availability. You do not need a synced calendar to compete, but you do need one honest, current sentence.
"Fully booked 20 December to 4 January, some dates left in February" is enough. It reassures the guest who is hesitating, it filters out the one who was about to write for nothing, and it says something more persuasive than any sales copy: that you are working. Put the last-updated date next to it. Six-month-old availability does more damage than none at all.
Writing to the chef, not to the middleman
Every booking taken through a platform costs you a commission, and leaves you with nothing to keep: no email address, no right to get back in touch next year, even though families often return to the same villa. The maths is not ideological, it is accounting, and we laid it out in our comparison of direct booking and platforms.
On your own site, a short form does the job: dates, number of guests, villa or area, allergies, message. Five fields. A WhatsApp button beside it, because some of your guests will never fill in a form but will happily send a message. And a reply from you, in the language they wrote in, the same day.
Where to start
If you have nothing today, a single page does the work: who you are in three lines, three menus with prices, six photos, your dates, a form. Five screens, two languages. It is the format we build for the island's food businesses, and it is on our page for restaurant and food business websites.
The rest, the reviews, the journal, the Google listing, comes later, once the first enquiries land in your inbox directly. What matters for December is that on a Sunday night, the family in Boston finds their answers on your site rather than on someone else's.
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