Over the years, we’ve grown from checking fishing licenses reactively – when someone lodges a complaint about a captain – to doing so proactively. Now, we’re working hard to only advertise legitimate fishing charters all over the world.
This means that we’re currently the largest directory of licensed fishing charters in the United States. Our mission is to only promote verified listings in the rest of the world, too.
Here’s how we’re doing it.
Introducing Invisible Until Verified
While anyone is free to make a listing on FishingBooker, it will only become visible to customers once we’ve proven that it’s a legitimate fishing charter.
This is currently the case in the United States for any new captain signing up. Right now, no one can go fishing with a new listing until we check and approve the captain’s credentials.
Over the course of the year, we will start applying this rule to other areas of the world, too. As every country has different rules and some have more information readily available than others, this won’t happen overnight. But we have big dreams and we’re committed to only promoting legitimate fishing charters.
More Than Just a Fishing License
The first step of verification is making sure that captains have the fundamental necessities to run a fishing business. While this varies according to the charter’s location, it usually includes:
- A captain’s license
- Boat registration
- Their local guide or charter license
- Boat Insurance
The second step is making sure to the best of our ability that all guides have the correct type of permit for the type of fishing they’re doing. This is much harder to enforce.
This is important in the US waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Here, it’s very difficult and expensive to get a license to go 10 miles or more offshore.
We want our customers to know what their captain is legally allowed to do. So, after learning a lot from captains in the area, we started categorizing state and federal fishing licenses within the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, each listing in the Gulf of Mexico either has a “state licensed” or “federally permitted” badge, so customers know where they will be able to fish legally.
Enforcing where people are fishing is far from easy. But the least we can do is inform customers fully about where their fishing trip will take place.
As we continue to expand our verification coverage, we’ll be in touch. We’re constantly talking to captains to improve our coverage of legitimate fishing charters and hope you’ll join us on this journey.
