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Swell POS partner Square can now support fuel sales!!!!

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There are three things to focus on when trying to get the most out of a facility’s wet slips or linear dock space. Fitting the largest possible boat in each of your berths. Filling tenant slips that are temporarily vacant with transient boaters. And lastly, ensuring that a new boat is ready to move into a slip the day after the current tenant permanently vacates the slip. 

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Swell Advantage and Square announced today an integration to better service marinas and waterfronts across the US and Canada and meet boaters’ customer service expectations in a digital world.

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Most marinas and waterfronts are susceptible to ransomware attacks because poor IT infrastructure and old management software dominate the industry. The base code for most systems used by the industry were built 20 years ago. These off-the-shelf systems are hosted locally on marina computers, often a server in the basement. The combination of old programs running on old IT infrastructure is a prime target for ransomware.

So why has the industry been so late at adopting new cloud based systems designed to mitigate ransomware attacks?

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Like hotels, golf courses and private clubs, marinas are customer service focused organizations. Today, customer service expectations have reached beyond just a friendly, smiling face at the front desk or on the dock. Customers expect you to communicate with them in a way that fits their busy lives and they want to feel special. With the increased professionalization of the marina industry there’s added pressure for all marinas to up your customer service game.

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Attend most large boat shows these days and you’ll probably find a busy booth showing off the latest in electric powered boats and electric outboard engines. In the recent past most electric propulsion systems have been small electric outboards used in fishing or inboard electric systems on sailboats. Boats powered primarily with electric propulsion have been around for a while but their limited range and high price made them only suitable for jobs like a tender at a marina or resort. That’s starting to change with advancements in battery technology and lessons learned from electric car companies like Tesla.

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A promotional piece for the upcoming MRA conference in October (we’ll be there so say hi if you’re going!) outlines a talk by Safe Harbor CEO Baxter Underwood called “Is the Marina Industry on the Brink of Institutionalizing?.” Using the example of the consolidation of ski hills in the 80’s, he argues that marinas are going through the same kind of transition today. With a few big players like Safe Harbor and Suntex snapping up marinas at a dizzying pace, and a lot of smaller regional players consolidating a half dozen or more local marinas, it’s hard to argue his point.

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The marina industry embraces a wide range of wet slip pricing models. Different pricing models represent regional norms, types of marina customers, local seasonality, historical practices, a few hangovers from the 2008 economic downturn and local regulations.

A limited number of marinas effectively use analytics to drive the day-to-day actions of employees. Combining the right pricing model with the right employee facing analytics framework can go a long way in growing wet slip revenues, and more importantly profit, in a marina.

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Traditionally, the marina industry has been slow to adopt emerging software technologies. Difficulties in providing onsite wifi, the small size of the industry, older demographics dominating management and high industry fragmentation have all contributed. Currently, we’re seeing this trend start to reverse. Industry consolidation, a new generation of boaters demanding modern conveniences, better marina wifi, and the evolution of software development are all driving unprecedented innovation in marina software.

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The fundamentals of software development and infrastructure have hit a rapid period of change. Marina and boat club managers have more choice than ever before. There is often a very real trade-off between the complex and the simple. A complex and cumbersome system may manage everything but do nothing great, or newer systems that do a few things very well with a modern workflow and user experience, do not manage all of the potential services and components of your marina.

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Emerging Technologies That Are Changing The Marina Industry: To help marina and boat club professionals navigate what solutions will work best for, or impact, your marina, here are some of the key emerging technologies that are, or will soon be, part of your day-to-day. The technologies and new technology-enabled business models that we touch on are algorithms, chatbots, language translation, customer-relationship-management, artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomous boats, mobile apps, cloud hosting, software-as-a-service, and marketplaces.

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It isn’t a stretch to believe that in 2018 it’s more important to provide great wifi on the dock than freshwater. Over the past decade, since the arrival of smartphones, the vast majority of us have increasingly moved our physical lives online.

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It’s easy to look across the bay, lake, river, or harbor and think that marina or yacht club is your main competition, but it’s not. If anything, that marina or club down the way might be your biggest ally.

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Marinas and yacht clubs have two functional layers to manage.

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Since every marina is different, it’s important to find a pricing strategy that works best for you. Here are the four pricing strategies marinas use and how you can make the most of them at your facility.  

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