Everybody’s heard of the bed and breakfast, but did you know there’s such a thing as a boating bed and breakfast?
Essentially they’re houseboats on landlocked lakes, and you can find them in cities like Newport, Miami, and San Francisco. The whole idea is to give travelers a unique and different experience outside of the traditional hotel room.
It’s a sentiment we’ve seen mirrored in the sharing economy with platforms like Uber and Airbnb: defying the status quo surrounding driving and hotel accommodations. In that light, you can see that it’s almost a natural progression for the sharing economy to hit the boating demographic.
There are already platforms that optimize for boat rentals, like BoatBound, but it’s centered around taking a boat out on the water. What we haven’t seen are platforms focusing on renting boats for sleeping in.
I came across GetMyBoat not long ago, and they’ve tapped into this trend of boat and breakfasts by launching a new feature for their platform: Sleep Aboard. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but travelers basically can rent space on a docked boat to spend the night.
“The culture behind boating is incredible and diverse. Sleep Aboard is an opportunity for people worldwide to experience boating without ever leaving the docks,” says Bryan Petro, CIO at GetMyBoat.
Obviously there’s a benefit for travelers, offering an exotic option for sleeping. However, boat owners get a lot out of it as well. Perhaps you want to rent your boat but you’re not comfortable letting a group of people take it on the water for a day. Sleep Aboard lets owners get some cash in their pocket without the worry.
It’s only been about two weeks since the team launched Sleep Aboard, but so far they’ve locked down over 1,000 boats across each of the seven seas in the world.
“In the 21st century, travelers seek new and unique experiences. Gone are the days of cookie cutter hotels. Nothing beats an evening on the docks and a boat that rocks you to sleep,” says Petro.
You also have to consider how this would affect a city like San Diego, where we have city-wide conferences, concerts, Comic Con, and major sporting events that overload traditional hotels. There are thousands of boats in San Diego that just sit in the marinas, totally untouched.
GetMyBoat is, first and foremost, a boat rental marketplace. However, with the addition of Sleep Aboard, the team is expecting to gain a host of new users while also cornering the market on overnight boat accommodations. It’s a pretty brilliant strategy, and honestly I think it’s just a super fun idea: ten times out of ten I’d sleep on a boat over a dumb hotel room.
Image Credit: Pixabay