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The Birth of WeNeedaVacation.com

Joan Talmadge | Updated 2/8/2022
[caption id="attachment_2171" align="alignright" width="300"]WeNeedaVacation.com Co-owners and Founders, Joan and Jeff Talmadge WeNeedaVacation.com Co-owners and Founders,
Joan and Jeff Talmadge[/caption] The year was 1997, and we were entering our second season of renting out our vacation home in East Orleans. Jeff was burning the midnight oil as he created an interactive website for vacation rentals. This was a time, mind you, when many people were totally unfamiliar with the Internet, never mind advertising vacation rentals through this vehicle. Five-line newspaper ads were more the norm! The next step was thinking of a name for our website. Our first idea was to call our company “Journey’s End.” In fact, we even had stationery printed. (Yes, back then, people still wrote letters.) But we were stopped in our tracks when a few friends suggested that Journey’s End sounded like a funeral home! Whoops. The next name we conceived of was “All Seasons Vacation Rental Network.” Since we planned to advertise rentals in all of New England (next stop, the world!), and since company names were often listed alphabetically, we felt we had a winner. Now we needed a website URL. In a meeting with a marketing expert, she encouraged us to think of something catchy. “It doesn’t have to be short,” she said, “and, in fact, it could even be a sentence.” So, in a rare moment of creativity, I came up with “WeNeedaVacation.com.” Now, here we are, 16 years later having dropped the All Seasons name and still going strong with this website name. I would be a rich woman if I had a dollar for every time I answer the phone with “WeNeedaVacation.com,” and the person on the other end of the line says, “Boy, do we!” Why List Your Property on WeNeedaVacation.com              Find a Rental  
About Joan Talmadge

About Joan Talmadge: In 1996, my husband Jeff and I purchased our Cape home and began looking for a way to rent it out during the summer. That's when Jeff created WeNeedaVacation, and the rest is history! After teaching fifth grade for 8 years and spending 15 years writing and editing educational publications, I found myself transitioning into a new career as a business owner. Today, we're fortunate to have a wonderful team of capable, caring staff, and Jeff and I are especially proud that two of our three grown children work with us. After 26 summers of renting out our home, we now live here year-round and couldn't be happier. The Cape truly is magical, no matter the season.