Web-based rental service connects boaters to vessels

A new option is available for local residents and visitors who want to get out on the water, without the cost of owning a boat or other watercraft.

GetMyBoat is a Web and smartphone app-based platform that connects people who want time on the ocean, with owners of watercraft, from stand-up paddleboards to mega-yachts.

Company officials liken the service to online platforms such as airbnb or VRBO, which offer accommodations, and to Uber, which offers rides from place to place.

Hawaii’s visitor industry has long offered these beachfront or waterfront options, it’s just that GetMyBoat is a new, and potentially spur-of-the-moment venue through which to find them.

The service offers 130 rental choices in 23 isle locations statewide, choices that are among 23,000 "boats" in 110 countries around the world. The word "boat" is used as a sort of shorthand to describe all the different types of watercraft possibilities in a general way.

The isle offerings include many long-established and well-known charter companies looking to promote their services, as well as private owners who welcome the opportunity to offset their cost of ownership, GetMyBoat officials say.

"Our founders are avid boaters and sailors," said Chief Information Officer Bryan Petro, referring to CEO Sascha Mornell and CTO Rafael Collado.

As long as a decade ago, the partners noticed how full marinas always are, with the boats "just sitting there," depreciating, Petro said. They thought there must be a way to help these boat owners offset the cost of ownership. Studies show boat owners use their expensive toys only 8 percent of the year.

Perhaps that’s the reason behind the truism: The two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat and the day the sell the boat.

The full-marinas recollection percolated into GetMyBoat with the emergence of the so-called sharing economy, and the app was built, populated and launched in beta-version in the spring of 2013. The San Francisco-based company has a dozen employees.

The app is free to download for iPhone or Android users, and those with watercraft available for rental or charter pay nothing to list their vessels with GetMyBoat.

So, um, how does GetMyBoat make money?

"We have a few ways of monetizing" the service, Petro said, including through premium services such as advertising, paying a premium for higher listings among search results, and through its third-party insurance offering through Falvey Yacht Insurance, he said.

Insurance for just the duration of the rental or charter event starts at $29, the company said.

Not just anybody can rent a yacht, a yawl, a sloop or a ketch and take it out on the water themselves.

"We’ve addressed that in several ways," Petro said. Renters generally know their limits, and the GetMyBoat platform has a sort of two-way review system to give the boat-offering party an opportunity to determine the customer’s seaworthiness.

When a customer submits a reservation, "the owner has a chance to communicate directly" with them to either allow an outright rental upon proof of boating safety certification or to offer a captained charter experience, or, as a last resort, to turn them down and send them looking for a different provider.

Those listing watercraft set their own prices, and those prices range wildly, from $10 an hour to rent a stand-up paddleboard, to $6,000 a day for a chartered cruse in a 90-foot luxury motor yacht. In between are jet ski rentals, outrigger canoe rides, a "pirate ship adventure" and fishing boat charters by the hour or by the day.

ON THE NET:
» getmyboat.com

Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.