Two hours on the high seas with the “Airbnb for boats.”
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I grew up in Queens, where my family's summer recreational activities included playing basketball in the church parking lot down the street from our apartment, taking a not-so-quick train ride into the city to go to the Museum of Natural History, and the occasional trip to the Poconos in Pennsylvania. My family and I rarely went to the beach. As a Muslim girl in an era before the Burqini, I had few comfortable swimwear options short of wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt in the water. My parents, both of whom grew up either swimming in the ocean just down the street in the Philippines or the family lake in Bangladesh, were cut off from what was an integral part of their upbringing.
And boating? We had no real idea of how to go about renting a boat — this was during the time of dial-up internet and very slow desktop computers — much less whether we'd be able to afford it. Boating was, and still is, a luxury recreational activity, one that often requires either "knowing a guy," owning your own boat, or knowing where to look. Boating was for people who owned seersucker and used the word "summer" as a verb. It was for Kennedys, not Bhuiyans.
Which is partly why I initially scoffed at the boat-sharing startup Boatbound — at the tech-buzzword-y tagline "Airbnb for boats," at the deeply First World problem it was attempting to solve. Boatbound looked, to me, like yet another product of a bubbly cottage industry in which anything can be "shared" (for a hefty fee), no matter how niche or ridiculous. It wasn't exactly BlackJet, which proudly markets itself as "Uber for private jets," but it didn't feel entirely far off from it, either.
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But to hear Boatbound tell it, the company has a rational — maybe even admirable — aim: to give people who wouldn't otherwise have access to boats a simple way to rent one, in exchange for a relatively reasonable fee. And as it turns out, the boating industry is, for lack of a much better turn of phrase, ripe for disruption.
Aaron Hall created Boatbound in 2012 while vacationing on Texas's Gulf Coast. Hall and his family wanted to rent a boat for the day and saw there was limited available inventory at the marina and yet so many boats just sitting in the docks not being used. After partnering with Boat U.S., which pegs itself as the largest boating association in the country, and surveying "thousands of boat owners," Hall and his staff found that the average boat owner uses their boat only 14 days out of the year, even though the boat owners nationwide spend about $10 billion a year on storage and maintenance.
Boatbound, then, is an efficiency-maximizing effort in the classic two-birds, one-stone manner of Airbnb, Getaround, and other sharing-economy companies: It's a one-stop shop for potential boat renters, but it also allows boat owners to offset associated ownership costs.
"We have an owner, Eric, in San Francisco, who always wanted to own a boat but couldn't quite afford it," a Boatbound spokesperson told me in an email. "After he heard about Boatbound, he made the decision to buy, knowing he could completely offset the costs with just a couple rentals a month. Now his boat is actually making him money."
Much like Airbnb, Boatbound allows owners to set their own prices, while they gather data about what rates work best for both owners and renters. If the boat is not rented at a certain price point, Boatbound will suggest a different. In New York, day rates run from $350 for a six-passenger, 19-foot Bayliner, all the way up to $7,000 for a 97-foot luxury yacht that fits 12 people. Boatbound charges a 5% transaction fee to boat owners who provide their own insurance, and 35% to those who opt in to the company's $3 million rental insurance.
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