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2024 Update Coming Soon Published- July 2020 Number of pages -94
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The emergence of Airbnb and Uber has laid the groundwork for the sharing economy to thrive. On-demand boat rental is just one example of that. They have made the idea of sharing more acceptable which allows for better utilization of resources, be it an idle car, house, office or even boating for that matter.
Most of the private boats in the US and Europe sit unused for ~90% of the year, and maintenance, taxes, marina rental, and other expenses make ownership incredibly expensive for the value it offers. This is the biggest reason why boats have a strong potential to grow in the booming sharing economy. For every boat owner in the US and Europe, we believe there will be ten people who can pay to rent a boat just to get an experience of being in the water.
The traditional boat rental companies, only offered weekly and monthly rentals, leaving out a large chunk of consumers who want it just for the sake of experience, maybe a day or even a few hours. This market gap has allowed on-demand boat rentals to flourish and scale up faster than anybody imagined.
As we are already seeing by the growing popularity of mobility as a service as opposed to car ownership, the reason is simple, the millennial population believes in experiencing things rather than owning things. They want to create memories that can be captured on their phones, shared, and talked about on social media without pinching their pocket. However, the biggest challenge for on-demand boat rental operators is to develop awareness about this industry.
As per our assessment, there are ~16.7 million registered boats in the US which are used less than 10% in a year. This provides a huge PARC population of boats that could be rented out. The rentals usually vary from ~$100 to $1500 a day depending on the kind of boat selected, which is certainly not unaffordable for >50% of US households who earn >$50,000 a year.
” The Global Boat Rental market will be a $ 440 Million Opportunity by 2025, the market volume will have similar growth as the market value as the average ticket size will not be subject to high degree of change “
The operators usually generate revenue by charging a commission from the boat owner, renter, and crew. The boat owners can use this opportunity to reduce the financial burden of boat ownership. All of this added with an asset-light model of boat rental operators makes for a lucrative market opportunity.
On-demand boat rental market is a small derivative of the global boat rental market. Some market reports claim that, the boat rental market size is more than $25 Billion per annum. We believe that`s completely inaccurate and for that to happen at-least a few vendors should have annual revenues to the tune of Multi- hundred Million dollars. As of Nov 2019, we are not aware of any such vendor.
There are more than 10 operators (mostly start-ups) in the US and European markets. They all have a similar business model with varying numbers of locations and users. Boatsetter is present in more than 300 locations around the U.S. since it just whereas Sailo has almost 5,000 boats across the U.S. and Europe. Getmyboat is one of the biggest operators in this market with XX% market share. The market seems so lucrative to traditional marine stalwarts like Yanmar, that it has also invested in one of the startups.
