Jeanne Dailey, the owner of Newman-Dailey Resort Properties in Miramar Beach, Fla., chokes up when she recalls receiving an email from Jeremy Gall, a co-founder of online vacation rental website FlipKey, offering some help to get through the oil-spill crisis.
Newman-Dailey manages about 200 vacation rentals in the Florida Panhandle area of Destin, between Pensacola and Panama City, where some area beaches have had some oil wash up onto their sands.
Gall's email a few weeks ago informed Dailey that FlipKey, and its majority owner TripAdvisor, would be offering Newman-Dailey three months of free Vacation Rentals listings on both websites as a way to help the lodging industry cope with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
"I get emotional about this," Dailey says, talking about the email's arrival, because Gall's offer arrived "when no one us would help us out."
Dailey figures she's saving $2,000 per month because of the TripAdvisor and FlipKey program.
TripAdvisor spokesman Kevin Carter says "thousands of hospitality businesses, from Louisiana to Florida, are taking advantage of our extension of three months of free marketing support. Overall, the response has been very positive."
Under the offer, inns, B&Bs and hotels which already participate in TripAdvisor's Business Listings program get a three-month extension for free and nonadvertisers can sign on for three months at no charge.
The same arrangement holds for Vacation Rentals advertisers and nonadvertisers on TripAdvisor and FlipKey.
Dailey says the area tourism industry has had to live through hurricanes and the economic slide of 2008 and 2009, but "we've never had to deal with a crisis of this magnitude, with the oil spill."
This is a different kind of crisis, she explains, and "we're just trying to feel our way."
Dailey notes that a couple of nearby beaches, including Fort Walton Beach, about eight miles from Destin, had some oil wash up onshore, but have since re-opened after governmental authorities and local people hired by BP cleaned the beach and tested the water to ensure it was safe for swimming.
Oil arrived -- Dailey describes it as "almost nothing, a couple of tarballs" -- on Destin's sands in the last few days, but it has been cleaned up.
"People are in the water, they are enjoying the beach just like normal," Dailey says.
"This," she says, referring to beach closings here and there, "is our new reality."
Dailey says the national news media have sensationalized the situation, and the impact on local tourism has been "horrific."
You wouldn't know the actual environmental impact in the Florida Panhandle has been "minimal" from reading the press reports, she says.
For Newman-Dailey-managed vacation rentals, reservations are off about 30% to 40% compared with last year.
This time last year, the company's reservations' agents were spending about 90% of their time handling bookings, but now they are occupied half the time just "trying to save reservations," Dailey says.
Thanks in part to the free listings that Newman-Dailey properties are taking advantage of on FlipKey and TripAdvisor, Dailey says the company has received 61 booking inquires in the first 17 days of June, compared with 134 in all of April.
The downturn likely would have been worse without the free marketing support from the two websites, she says.
On its own website, Newman-Dailey is being aggressive about setting the record straight about the oil's impact, with updates about the oil spill, photos -- with the dates they were taken -- of its beaches and a video telling travelers, "So come on down and enjoy our beautiful beaches."
It's even better than the Caribbean, she claims.