Dear Mr Cutts:

I am a guy who makes a meager living in Costa Rica designing and managing Costa Rica vacations.

I own and operate the online vacation planning company with the web site www.packagecostarica.com.

I have been doing that since 2003. I am a permanent resident of Costa Rica.

Around mid-2012 I noticed a change in our search rankings, primarily with Google. At the time I had no knowledge of any “penguins” or “pandas” that might be out to get me.

Now I do.

Before mid-2012 my site did quite well with important search terms such as Costa Rica vacations and Costa Rica vacation packages.

We ranked consistently in the top 10. If my memory serves me well, I believe practically everyone showing up back then was a local competitor.

But all that changed around June of 2012.

I remained in denial for some time that anything was systematically amiss, rationalizing that these changes were the result of the frequent “google-dances” that I had witnessed over the years.

But as time drug on I did finally come to grips with the fact that these changes seemed to be more of a permanent nature.

I was never a spammer in any sense of the word. I simply have a site that folks find on the internet, usually through a targeted search using a similar phrase as that described above. They make an inquiry, we follow up with a custom made itinerary and they either book it, or not. If they do, we manage their vacation from arrival to departure.

That is the business.

Our value-add is that we know the country very well and are actually located here and can provide in-country support to our customers during their vacation.

I do admit the mistake of relying too much on “experts” when it came to web site development. I was slow to make the change over to a content management system like WordPress that would allow me to manage things myself.

But at the beginning of 2013 I did decide to do just that. I converted the site to WordPress and focused on delivering regular focused content that would be helpful to my customers.

We also implemented social network campaigns using Facebook and Pinterest.

But rather than get better, things have gotten worse. My sales have been cut in half. I did drastically lower overhead and I am getting by as a result.

Now I could understand if the reason we are getting hurt so badly is because we are losing when it comes to our delivery of content versus our competition.

But I have come to the conclusion that something else is going on here.

Consider the following search results.

Out of the top 10 for the search term Costa Rica vacations only 2 of the results are local companies like mine. I know both of them well and they are worthy competitors.

With respect to Costa Rica vacation packages, only 1 is local.

The rest are large travel and tourism industry players who aren’t located in Costa Rica, who don’t focus exclusively on Costa Rica, don’t hire in Costa Rica nor deal primarily with Costa Rica vendors.

The real problem is that none of those outside corporations have a chance at delivering the service and overall Costa Rica experience that local companies like the 2 that do show up, as well as my own, can deliver.

In short, your search customers are getting hurt, as well as is Costa Rica as a whole.

So I have decided to fight this.

How?

Well, I will continue to do so by trying to deliver the best content I can.

But that doesn’t seem to be good enough.

So, I will also fight against this obvious corporate sell out to big business. This letter is the start.

Costa Rica is no longer an exotic tourism destination that was once mainly heard of through word-of-mouth. Now it is just another destination. And the corporate big-wigs have all jumped headfirst onto the Costa Rica tourism bandwagon.

And Google appears to be making sure that they now own the lion’s share of the search ranking pie.

This threatens my livelihood. As I said, I make a meager living designing and managing Costa Rica vacations. A living that would be under the poverty line in the U.S., but allows me to live comfortably here in Costa Rica.

I do it because I love this place and love to share it with others.

This is therefore a matter of life and death for me!

And I am not going to sit by idly and watch Costa Rica become just another commoditized vacation experience.

I thought that Google’s motto was “don’t be evil.”

In this case, I’m afraid you’re not living up to it!

Sincerely,

Scott Bowers
Owner of Package Costa Rica

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