What Makes HuntGuidePro Different Than Other Sites That List Hunts

In November 2024, it occurred to me that it was way too hard to find a great guided hunt. This is still a fragmented and opaque industry. If I want to buy a house, I can go to Zillow and easily search all the inventory. If I need a car, I go to AutoTrader. If I need freelance work, I go to Fiverr. It made me wonder why there is no comprehensive search option for guided hunts. 

Yes, there IS a small handful of websites that list hunts already. BookYourHunt, Worldwide Trophy Adventures, and Venku are three main ones, along with a few other much smaller sites. But they only have a very small fraction of the inventory, and I found their search features to be lacking. On top of that, these sites wouldn't allow me to see the actual outfitter offering the hunt or to contact them directly for further information.

We believe our platform brings a completely different approach.

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Here are the structural differences in what HuntGuidePro is and what it does: 

1. Other hunt listing services seem to primarily make money by taking a commission on hunts that are booked on their platform. They are brokers. Because of this, many outfitters will choose not to list their hunts on the platforms.
2. The broker websites put themselves between you and the outfitter. They usually want you to communicate with the outfitter directly on their platform. It often is difficult or impossible to tell from a hunt listing who the actual outfitter is (recall that these brokers make fees on bookings, therefore don't want you to go directly to the outfitter and bypass them). Contrast that with HuntGuidePro, where we are happy for you to click through a link to visit the outfitter's website directly, or call or email them. It's your choice. Our platform is a resource for hunters. Down the road we will likely offer featured listings to outfitters as a revenue source. Even when we introduce featured listings, every outfitter—big or small—will still be listed for free, and hunters will always have full access to unbiased search results. Our priority is building the most complete and transparent hunt database, not influencing your choices based on who pays us the most. But for now, we do not have a monetization strategy at all.
3. HuntGuidePro is first and foremost, a data company. Meaning, we are building a deep database of hunts and outfitters, gathering detailed features of those hunts. Having this data allows us to provide the most robust search experience of any website. Our focus is on the hunter. We have 17 search filters, with more to be added in the future: state, species, price, weapon(s), hunt style(s), land type(s), transportation method(s), accommodation, whether housing is included, heating & cooling, sleeping arrangement, food, cell service, combo hunt, drop camp, year round hunt, or whether the hunt includes dogs.

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Here are the concrete advantages:

1. More listings. We have over 600 hunts today and expect to have over 2,000 within 4 months. This, we believe, will be 2-4x the inventory of other hunting websites. The medium-term goal is to have 10,000 hunts on the website, covering all 50 states and Canada.
2. Better search features. We have 17 filters, and plan to add more.
3. Ability to contact outfitters directly. Once you create an account and log in, you'll be able to see name, email, phone number, and URL of the outfitters on our website.

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We know we have work to do though. In addition to aggressively adding more hunts, we know that we need to add pictures to our listings.

Please email me at james@huntguidepro.com with your thoughts. I'd love to hear from you!