One road on, one road off, and a season that pays for the year

Two customers, and they do not arrive the same way

The trade on the island is easy enough to list: fishing and dolphin charters out of Lazaretto Creek, kayak trips over to Little Tybee, golf cart and bike hire, beach gear, the restaurants and bars at the south end by the pier, wedding and elopement photographers, and the people who manage other people's cottages.

Most of them serve two customers who behave nothing alike. One booked a cottage in March for a week in August, is planning that week from four states away, and is comparing you against two other operators weeks before they arrive. The other is a day tripper who decided over breakfast in Savannah, is on Highway 80 right now, and wants to know whether you are open, what it costs, whether they can do it today, and where to park.

The first needs an enquiry answered properly while they are still deciding, which usually means sooner than a return call the next morning. The second needs an answer on a phone screen in about ten seconds, without pinching to zoom. A site tends to get built for one of those two without anyone deciding to, and the other one leaves.

One road, and what it does to your no-shows

Highway 80 is the only way on and off the island. There is no alternate route. It floods on high tides often enough to close: in October 2025 the water shut the road between the Bull River and Lazaretto Creek bridges on the eighth highest tide ever recorded at Fort Pulaski, and it had done the same the previous November. Both bridges date from 1960, their replacement has been argued over for years and is still not built, and a separate state plan to redesign US 80 on the island itself was withdrawn in April 2026 after the council and most of the people who spoke at the open house came out against it.

You know all this. The point is what it does to your operation. Some of your no-shows are not people who changed their mind, they are people sitting on a two lane road or turned back by water on it. And a fair number of your phone calls are people asking where to park, which is paid, eight in the morning to eight at night, every day of the year, through the Park TYB app.

Both of those are a website's job rather than yours. A reminder sent the morning of the booking, with travel time and the parking answer on it, costs nothing to send and takes the calls away. The parking answer belongs on the page, not in your ear all day in July.

If you let property on Tybee, the rules keep moving

Roughly 1,575 of the island's 2,994 housing units were registered as short term vacation rentals as of 2024. That is not a side industry, that is the housing stock, and it is the most heavily regulated thing on Tybee. The city has licensed short term rentals since 2016 and has amended the rules repeatedly since, most sharply in June 2024, when the council barred licence transfers and stopped issuing new permits in residential zones.

It is still moving. On 6 August 2026 a Chatham County judge dismissed the Tybee Alliance's challenge to the ordinance, leaving in place the rules that bar new registrations across roughly eighty percent of the island. At the same time the council is working through a rewrite that would divide Tybee into four zones with different caps, sixty percent in the eastern and southern zones, thirty percent in the western and northern ones.

Two things follow if you manage or let property here. Your site has to be editable by you, today, without ringing a developer, because what you are allowed to advertise can change between council readings. And your back office needs to hold licence numbers, renewal dates and per property compliance somewhere other than a spreadsheet and your memory. That second half is the part most web designers leave to you.

We are eighteen miles up the road, and we are new

We are in Savannah, not on Tybee. No office on the island, and no pretending otherwise. Eighteen miles is close enough to drive out and sit in your place during service and watch what actually happens when it is busy, which is the only honest way to design a booking flow that survives a Saturday in July.

The other honest bit: Y2 started in 2025 and has a short client list. None of it is on Tybee. If you want an agency that can show you fifty beach town builds, that is not us. What we can do is look at what you have now and tell you what is costing you bookings, before you pay us anything.