Managing a charter business comes with many different challenges on a day-to-day basis. From maintaining the fleet, to managing turnarounds on busy check-in days, to providing the best customer experience possible, software tools are essential for a successful charter operation.

A charter fleet management software tool can help streamline a lot of these processes, and finding the right tool for your business will ultimately save you valuable time and resources. It can help staff communication during turnaround days, give you peace of mind having all of your operational data organized in one place, and make your charter guests feel more confident and supported during charter.

In this post, we will explain:

• What is a fleet management platform?
• What are the benefits of using a software tool for fleet management and charter operations?
• What should you look for when searching for the best fleet management tool for your business?
• Why are increasingly more charter businesses investing in a fleet management tool?
• 5 charter management platforms to consider

Keep reading to learn more!

What is a yacht charter management platform?

A fleet management platform is a software tool designed to help yacht charter companies and fleet operators manage various aspects of their business operations. The tool can offer a range of features like mobile check-in and out, charter support for clients, yacht maintenance tracking and automation, and crew scheduling and inventory management.

What are the benefits of using a software tool for fleet management and charter operations?

As a charter operator, the benefits you get from using a yacht charter management tool include, but are not limited to:

• Improving internal communication between the office and base through real-time information available from a central place, accessible by anyone from your team at any time. Say goodbye to endless whatsapp messages and calls!
• Enhancing customer experience as customers have access to all the necessary information before, during and after charter, and they have a dedicated support app that assists them during the trip.
• Saving valuable time and thus needing less staff to do the same number of turnarounds on check-in day, while actually improving the quality of check-ins.
• Increasing upsell potential of additional items from the charter guest app.
• Keeping track of upcoming and performed maintenance tasks. Never forget a routine task due to the automatic creation of tasks based on periodic rules.
• Automatically maintaining a boat log for all your boats. This is extremely valuable for all stakeholders including external owners or new owners when retiring and selling yachts in your fleet.

What to consider when choosing the right yacht charter fleet management platform?

There are a few key features you need to look for when deciding on your fleet management platform. These are:

1. Functionality

Most importantly, you need to decide which functionalities you need in a fleet management platform and pick the tool that has all of those features available to best support your business. For example, mobile check-in and out, in-app chat support for your guests, and a maintenance tracking and scheduling system.

2. Easy of use

It should be quick and easy to set up your yachts on the platform when you start using it for the first time, but it is even more important that further changes you want to make to your setup are easy, quick and intuitive. Think about changes in your checklist, updates in yacht equipment, or selling and buying yachts.

Moreover, the user interface should be clean, intuitive and simple so your staff and clients understand it without explanation. People are naturally resistant to change their ways, and having an easy-to-use application is imperative for success.

3. Client support app

Look for a solution that, next to the applications for your staff, has a comprehensive charter support app which serves as the first point of contact in case of any issues or questions. This makes customers feel at ease, and more confident during their charter.

An app available for your charter guests is also crucial in speeding up any administrative tasks like signing contracts, filling passenger lists, paying deposits, and you can even use it to increase extra revenue by providing easy ordering of additional extras that agents have usually no incentive of selling on your behalf.

4. The team behind the platform

In a small niche industry like the yacht charter industry, software products are specialized towards your specific use case, and the companies behind the charter management tools are providing a product for a smaller group of customers compared to mainstream tool providers.

This means that you will likely have a lot of personal contact with the companies behind the tool. Ask yourself, do you enjoy working with the team? Are they providing quality support, especially on the weekends? Do you know any other companies using their software that you could ask for feedback on their service?

Next to the support the company provides, you might want to dig a little deeper and also reassure that any company you go in business with is in it for the long run.

Questions like: Are they serious about their product and do they have a sustainable business model with which they can pay their bills? Will they be around for the long term? Are they moving fast enough and willing to listen to your ideas for new features to improve their product both for you and their other customers?

These are all things you might want to ask before starting a new partnership intended for the long run.

Why are increasingly more charter businesses investing in a fleet management tool?

It is no secret that the yachting industry is far behind other industries when it comes to digitization and technology.

However, over the last few years, several useful fleet management tools have become available and early adopters paved the way for more widespread adoption.

Additionally, with the ever increasing demand for charters, longer seasons, but less workforce available to put in the long hours, increasingly more charter operators are looking for new ways to make their business more efficient while improving the experience for their clients.

Here's where a charter fleet management software comes in.

Top yacht charter management software tools to consider

With those key considerations in mind, here are the fleet management tools you will likely find in your search, and worth your review.

Sailsense

Let's start with one of the more established tools, Sailsense. Sailsense is a trusted brand that started with hardware solutions for boats that allow you to track your boat metrics even when you're not around.

Features include things like automatic lights management, shock detections, diagnostics and anchorage alarms provided by their built-in hardware boxes.

However, its abundance of tracking features may not be necessary for fleets who have more pressing operational challenges to tackle first.

Sailsense also provides a basic check-in and check-out feature which helps to digitize the traditional paper check-ins and allows you to create custom checklists, but this functionality has been added later and was not part of their core features.

• Features: Specialized in boat metrics tracking and hardware and a basic check-in, check-out and maintenance functionality. If you want to be informed of all of your yacht's metrics at all times, this might be an interesting option for you. However, if you primarily want to improve your check-in day operations, customer experience and are looking for a maintenance solution this might not be the right solution for you.
• Ease of use: The check-in and check-out module is quite basic in functionality and cumbersome to set up. It does not allow you to reuse equipment between different lists and is not the most user friendly interface. Additionally, charter guests have to download the app, create an account, and verify their email address before being able to use it, which can cause a lot of friction on check-in day.
• Affordability: The hardware HUB box costs 899 EUR plus an additional 599 EUR for every POD sensor. Additionally there is a subscription fee of approximately 500 euros per yacht per year.

Nauticoncept

Nauticoncept is a solution aiming to provide better communication and data sharing related to a boat in case of repair, focusing on connecting technicians, boat owners and dealers.

Even though they do provide a checklist solution for charterers, their solution is mostly geared towards dealers and shipyards.

Nauticoncept is mostly focused on the French market and do all of their marketing in French, so this might not be the solution for you if you don't speak the language.

• Features: Maintenance logs, boat monitoring and basic checklists. They also provide a digital lock box for completely hands-off check-in and a built-in hardware box for diagnostics monitoring.
• Ease of use: Mostly focused on French stakeholders, so it might be a more difficult sales and set up process because of language barriers.
• Affordability: around 500 euro per boat per year, plus an additional hardware set up fee.

Seazone

Seazone is a full fledged yacht management software focused on crewed charter yachts. Seazone provides features such as yacht maintenance and financial and expense management for crewed charters.

If you are managing a crewed charter yacht and want help running the day to day business, this solution might be for you. For bareboat charter operators, Seazone is probably not the right solution as they do not provide a way to support check-in and check-out day operations.

• Features: Maintenance and inventory management, financial and expense management, charter and trip management.
• Ease of use: Seazone has a user-friendly interface with plenty of features.
• Affordability: Starting at 1080 EUR / year per yacht for yachts up to 17 meter for the full suite of features, this is one of the most expensive tools on the market.

Seahub

Seahub is a yacht maintenance management system with different modules like maintenance, equipment, inventory management, documents management, and project management. Seahub is designed for larger yachts with more advanced maintenance needs.

• Features: Very advanced maintenance management, inventory, and project management. Originally designed for single yacht management which makes it less than ideal for managing more than one yacht.
• Ease of use: Relatively straightforward to set up and use if you know what you’re doing.
• Affordability: Starting at 960 EUR per year per yacht Seahub might be for you if you are managing a large yacht with highly advanced maintenance tracking needs, but not so much if you are looking for a tool to manage a (bareboat) charter fleet.

Charter Manager App

Charter Manager App is a check-in / check-out system with item images, locations, and descriptions. It provides charter guests with the ability to read through item descriptions before they arrive to the base, and while on charter.

• Features: Check-in and check-out with images, descriptions and videos, weather information, but missing an integrated maintenance module.
• Ease of use: One disadvantage of using this software is that every boat and every item on each boat has to be set up individually, not allowing you to reuse checklists or items for similar boats. This means setup as well changes to your equipment instructions will be much more time consuming and cumbersome. Additionally, the user interface is known to be less than ideal as its dashboard doesn’t serve well on mobile, which doesn’t give staff or clients the user experience they deserve.
• Affordability: Prices start from 1500 EUR per year for the whole fleet, which is most likely cheaper than most other solutions on the market depending on your fleet size. Their pricing does not make their business model sustainable just from subscription fees, instead they monetize their app in different ways providing charter guests additional services from the app on which they make a commission.

Charter Manager App could be a solution to consider if you have a small budget, but still want to try digitizing part of your check-in and check-out operations. However, next to the setup process being more cumbersome than necessary, users have reported it is somewhat difficult to use and can therefore lack adoption from staff and guests.

Floatist

Floatist is a new, fast growing software company tackling charter companies' operational challenges and at the same time providing them with the tools to give their charter guests and staff the best experience.

Floatist is started from the founders’ own skippering experience and is being built completely with the needs of bareboat charter operators in mind.

Within 6 months of the beta product launch, Floatist had over 200 yachts on the platform and is continuously increasing this number with new partners.

• Features: Client pre-check guided with images, videos and multilanguage instructions, which are also available from a searchable yacht manual during charter. A real time dashboard for turnaround days allowing base, office, and cleaning teams to communicate seamlessly with each other without the traditional phone calls and whatsapp groups. In-app chat support for guests on charter, maintenance tracking and routine maintenance automatic task reminders for the fleet, access to all your own data through a data explorer interface and integrations to popular booking systems like MMK Booking Manager. Moreover, Floatist is moving very fast and adding new features every few weeks completely based on their customers’ suggestions and feedback.
• Easy of use: Users have reported that Floatist is intuitive and easy to use, allowing for quick adoption for both staff and charter guests. Additionally, fleet setup and checklist maintenance are easy with a global catalog of equipment shared between lists that can be shared between boats.
• Affordability: Prices start at 380 EUR per year per yacht for average sized fleets and includes everything you will need from onsite onboarding support to premium 24/7 customer support.

Floatist is the solution to consider if you want to level up your game as a charter fleet operator and say goodbye to cumbersome processes involving pen and paper.

Using Floatist you can provide your charter guests that ‘WOW’ experience, you can give your staff smoother turnaround days, and at the end of the day you save money because of the time saved and extra value created using the platform.

To learn more about what Floatist can do for your business, contact us on hello@floatist.com.