Advantages of boat rental automation

More and more rental operators hand the repeat work to software. It takes the bookings, collects the payments and tells customers what they need to know before they arrive. Here’s what changes in seven parts of the job.

1. Online booking

The phone rings. You rush to answer, hunt for a pen that works and flip through the paper calendar for the date the caller wants. Your tea goes cold. Meanwhile, the customer at the dock is waiting for their boat.

With an online booking form on your own website, customers pick a boat, see the price and book whenever it suits them. They pay the full amount or a down payment right away. Eleven at night, from the sofa, with nobody at your end. You still decide the prices and the schedule. You don’t sit by the phone to take the money anymore. Our step-by-step guide to your boat rental website shows where the form goes.

You don’t have to set it up alone. We start with a half-hour video call, with your own boats already in Let’s Book. Then we set up the rest with you, for free. We also move your existing bookings over.

2. Live availability and pricing

The dashboard shows which boats are free at every moment of the day. Your customers see the same picture when they book, so what they choose is actually available. You add boats and docks yourself.

Prices can follow rules you set. A quiet Tuesday morning can cost less than a Saturday afternoon in July. You can give a discount to people who book early, or fill a last-minute gap with a lower price. When a price doesn’t work, you change the rule, and new bookings follow it straight away.

3. Payment processing

Let’s Book hands the payment to Stripe or Mollie, and the money goes to your own account. Each booking shows what’s been paid and what’s still open, so you don’t need to check your bank to know who owes what.

Chasing money gets easier too. A booking can take a down payment first and the rest before the trip. If a customer doesn’t check out in the booking form, the booking expires on its own and frees the boat. For an open balance, you send a payment link by email or text. A security deposit goes back from the booking after the trip. Read the pros and cons of a deposit.

4. Boat maintenance

A boat that’s due a service goes out of service on its own page in Let’s Book. It stops being bookable until it’s back. Booking the mechanic is still up to you. Catching a service in time is cheaper than a boat that breaks down halfway through somebody’s afternoon. We wrote about that in how to schedule boat rentals.

With a connected boat, you know more about each trip. Let’s Book works with hardware modules from Sentinel Marine and Qondor, which you get from the partner on your own account with them. A connected boat registers its own trips, so the times come in without anyone writing them down. Sentinel Marine locks and unlocks the engine for the booking. Qondor starts and stops the engine. In Qondor’s own app you also see the route of every trip. When a boat leaves the area you set, Qondor warns you. Read how to connect an electric boat fleet.

5. Customer messages

Let’s Book sends the messages around a booking on its own: the confirmation, a reminder the day before, a text before pickup and a follow-up email after the trip. Every message is logged with its delivery status. When one never arrives, you resend it to a corrected address before the customer ends up at the wrong dock.

That also means fewer phone calls. You get the same questions every day: where to park, what time to arrive, what happens when it rains. Put those answers in the confirmation and the reminder, in your own words, and the customer has them before they think to ask. The boat rental customer journey follows every message from the booking to the next one.

6. Preventing double bookings

The rush to the phone from the first part has one more risk: the double booking. With every booking in one place, the same boat can’t be sold twice for the same time slot. While a customer pays, the boat is held for them. If the payment never comes, the boat is free again.

For each extra, you set how many a customer can order: per booking, per boat or per passenger. When you run out of fishing rods, you set them to out of stock, and they stop selling until you have them again.

We like to see the operators we work with grow. With every booking in one place, you don’t decide whether to buy another boat on a feeling about how busy last August was.

7. Sales figures

Whether to grow is a decision you make on numbers. The sales insights show what you sold over any period you pick, with revenue counted without tax and on the pickup date.

Each booking also keeps the real times of its trip. Your staff can check boats in and out at the dock, or, on a connected boat, the customer does it. They start and end the trip from their phone, so the times come into Let’s Book with nobody on the dock.

This season also sits next to the same period last year. So you see whether that quiet Tuesday you keep worrying about is really quieter than last year, or only feels that way.