How to Rent Out Your Boat? Guide For Hourly, Full-day & Multi-day Rentals
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Are you wondering how to rent out your boat? If you are a boat owner, chances are you’ve been thinking about renting it out at least once. With expensive maintenance and repair costs, insurance fees, and all kinds of other expenses keeping your boat in a proper state is a costly task. Moreover, many travelers and sea vacation enthusiasts who are not ready to invest in a yacht are willing to pay for a boat rental service. To help boat owners make their first steps in the boat rental business, we’ve prepared this article describing everything necessary to make it a profitable investment.
How to Establish a Boat Rental Business
Establishing your boat rental may seem a daunting task. However, with everything planned out in advance, achieving your goal is quite simple. Surely, it requires certain preparations & research. However, the result is worth the risk and spending. Similar to almost any modern business, boat rentals require a well-thought-out strategy regarding its multiple aspects. For example, before renting out a boat, you need to:
- Prepare a business plan;
- Research your target audience;
- Plan your budget;
- Have a marketing strategy;
- Find a proper location for storing your boat;
- Obtain permits & licenses;
- Take care of boat insurance;
- Develop an online listing for your boat rentals.
These crucial steps may surely seem complex at first but with a proper approach, they can give desired results and even transform your passion into a lucrative venture. Let’s take a close look at what’s required for establishing a boat rental business.
Business Plan
Establishing any business starts with creating a business plan, and boat rental is no different. It involves not just the planning required to create your business but also a lot of research. From choosing a business name to the proper location, a well-written business plan needs to consider every aspect of establishing and developing your business. It consists of several key parts that define the approach to making sure your boat charter business is successful:
- Business overview;
- Market analysis;
- Provided services;
- Operational & financial plans;
- Legal requirements;
- Possible risks.
After preparing the business plan for your boat rental company, you’ll have an easy-to-follow guide to how to rent out your boat and create a proper foundation for your business. This will not only increase your chances of success but also help to improve decision-making in vital stages of your business development.
Market Research & Strategy
Working on establishing your boat charter company requires not just a proper business plan but also lots of research. This includes a thought-out marketing strategy. you’ll need to decide the type of boat you want to rent out and the target audience to market your services. At the beginning of your business path, you’ll be limited to serving clients close to your physical location. However, with the development of your rental company and a well-developed website to advertise your boats and services, more opportunities will emerge.
Financial Planning
If you are asking yourself “How to rent out my boat?”, before moving any further you’ll need to decide on a budget and plan your key costs and spending. This is what the financial planning stage is for. To succeed in creating a proper financial plan, you’ll need to calculate the cost of boats and equipment alongside other expenses. For example, the average price for one boat you plan to rent out may vary from $15,000 to $150,000 depending on its type. With yachts, the cost may reach up to $1m. This significantly influences your financial plan. Moreover, there are other things you’ll need to include in your budget:
- Boating equipment;
- Moorage rental;
- Insurance fees;
- Communication devices & technology;
- Office & storage fees;
- Domain & hosting registration costs.
Business Name and Location
If you want to know how to rent out your boat and for your boat rental business to be memorable, we recommend choosing its name in advance. With a short and memorable name, your potential clients will be able to easily find you on- and offline. Furthermore, a proper business name makes it easy to market your rental services anywhere. Make sure your brand name:
- Is short yet scalable;
- Matches your business goal;
- Resonates with your target audience;
- Tells your company’s story;
- Isn’t already taken.
Aside from a memorable name, your boat charter company will need a spacious location for storing boats and performing booking & business operations. Renting out boats and providing related services requires you to be located near bodies of water. This can also influence your marketing strategy as some locations (for example tourist-rich cities) provide more opportunities than others. Note that your location doesn’t only need to have space for all the boats you rent out but also for your employees and equipment you plan to rent or use if you want to rent out a boat.
Permits and Licenses
To answer the question “How to rent out my boat?”, you need to be eligible for conducting any rental activity. Thus, you’ll have to obtain certain licenses & permits. This will ensure local and state authorities that your company meets all the set requirements for this type of business. From business licenses to health & safety permits, the range of needed documents may vary in different areas. It commonly includes licenses that need to be renewed every 1 to 3 years, so hiring a legal consultant may be of great use, especially to first-time business owners. Here’s the common list of licenses and permits you may need:
- General business license;
- Anchoring permits;
- Boat registration;
- Boater safety certification;
- Commercial passenger license;
- Environmental permits.
Insurance Coverage
If you’re wondering “What insurance do I need to rent out my boat?”, you’ll be surprised by the amount of available insurance options and requirements. To protect your company, its employees, and cover any possible damages & risks for equipment and boats, you’ll need to consider multiple insurance options. For example, general liability insurance will cover property damage and injuries. To protect your employees, you’ll also need to take care of the Workers’ compensation insurance. Other types of insurance for a boat rental company include:
- Liability insurance for protection against legal claims;
- Medical payments coverage;
- Commercial insurance for business operations;
- Coverage against damages caused by an uninsured boater.
Boat Rental Listing
Now that you have worked out all aspects of establishing a rental business, you may still wonder how to rent out your boat online. In this case, we recommend creating an impressive website to present your services, events, or promotions. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to build a website on WordPress. Note that it requires certain preparations to ensure a successful website launch. for example, before making your website public you’ll need:
- Choose a domain;
- Register a hosting account;
- Download & install WordPress;
- Find, download, and activate a fitting theme;
- Customize it, add your content and pages.
Hands-On Guide to Building a Boat Rental Website
The abovementioned process of developing your WordPress website may seem daunting but in reality, it is quite simple, especially when you prepare and configure everything it requires. Luckily, with modern web development technology, you don’t need to have nearly any coding knowledge. Thanks to the variety of page builder plugins, all customization and content editing can be done manually through a visual editor. This makes WordPress one of the best platforms to use for your boat rental website. Below we’ve prepared a small hands-on guide to establishing such a site in a few easy steps.
How to Rent Out a Boat via the WordPress Website
As you see, WordPress is a flexible and easy-to-use platform for establishing a website. It can be freely used to build an online presence for your boat rental business. After learning how to rent out your boat and installing WordPress on your hosting server, you will need to choose a fitting theme for your site. With a proper set of functional advantages and responsive design, the chosen theme can be used as a basis for full site customization and custom content creation. With a proper theme and plugins for WordPress, you’ll also be able to enjoy multiple benefits this CMS has to offer:
- Powerful dashboard for content management;
- Diverse eCommerce capabilities;
- SEO-friendly site structure;
- Built-in customization tools;
- Multiple booking management plugins.
Lorenty: a WordPress Theme for Boat Rentals
While WordPress is a powerful solution that can be installed freely, how do you find a fitting theme for a boat rental business? With thousands of WordPress themes available online, a small number of them are fitted for usage by equipment & boat rental businesses. One of the prime examples is Lorenty, a theme designed & developed by MotoPress. It provides multiple layouts for a variety of rental business websites, helping them to easily establish a memorable presence in the online space and provide rentals of:
- Boats & yachts;
- Bikes, scooters, and motorcycles;
- Heavy construction equipment;
- Aircrafts;
- Party & celebration equipment.
The theme is regularly updated to bring fixes and new features to its users. For example, its recent updates for built-in plugins and RTL support for email notifications. More importantly, Lorenty provides multiple pre-designed pages for boats, yachts, & destinations, allowing your site visitors to easily select and book a desired boat. Each of the pages can be customized with the Gutenberg page editor, which is supplied with every WordPress installation. To enhance its potential even further, theme developers provided the Getwid plugin for the page builder that adds 30+ extra blocks and sections. With them, you can not only answer the question of how to rent out your boat but also change and create new pages without referring to code editing. In addition, Lorenty comes with the following features:
- Built-in Appointment Booking plugin for online rental scheduling;
- 2 navigation menus;
- 3 header types;
- Multiple widget zones;
- Easy & quick demo data import.
Appointment Booking Plugin for Boat Rental Scheduling
As we mentioned above, Lorenty includes the Appointment Booking plugin, which is a feature-rich and powerful solution for businesses to accept and manage boat rentals. Its multiple features are designed for easy inventory & booking management. Thanks to the built-in reservation calendar, you’ll be able to control and reschedule boat rentals in a few clicks. The plugin also comes with built-in analytical tools and an automated notification system. This multifunctional plugin is a perfect fit for your boat rental website if you:
- aim to rent your boat out for day trips, fishing expeditions, or overnight stays;
- plan to rent out a boat seasonally;
- own a boat for personal use, but don’t use it all the time.
With an efficient scheduling system and easy management of services and inventory, the Appointment Booking plugin gives you all the tools to learn how to rent out your boat & establish proper boat rental with WordPress.
Even if you are just getting started or need specific booking features, this solution can help. With support of multiple locations and rentable items alongside online payment gateway support, the plugin offers one of the most diverse selections of features. Additionally, it provides extensive customization of booking and payment rules that include:
- hourly and all-day boat rentals;
- group bookings and ticket sales;
- multi-day rent by reserving several days one by one;
- support of deposit & on-site payments;
- custom availability for occasional boat rentals;
- inventory management for owners of single and multiple boats.
How to Set Up the Boat Rental Plugin
The developers of Appointment Booking provided extensive & helpful documentation for users of the plugin. However, if you want to start using Lorenty and the included plugin for booking management right away, you can do it in a few simple steps. Below we have prepared a simple quick start guide for new users of Appointment Booking.
Step 1: Install and activate the plugin
After purchasing the plugin and downloading it manually, you’ll need to install and activate it via the WordPress dashboard. This can be done in a few simple clicks.
Step 2: Perform basic setup
Navigate to “Appointments – Settings” in your site’s dashboard to configure the basic settings. Here you can set up:
- Confirmation mode (automatic, upon payment, or manual);
- Coupons & multi-booking options;
- Payment methods & currencies;
- Email notification details;
- Integrations etc.
Step 3 (Optional): Add employees
The next step of our guide on how to rent your boat is all about employees. In the Employees section of the plugin’s UI, you can add your employees to later provide them with individual accounts and booking schedules. To do this, press the “Add New” button and specify any necessary contact information, from phone numbers to social network links. Note: this step can be skipped if you plan to perform all booking management operations by yourself.
Step 4: Specify the boat rental locations
The Appointment Booking plugin supports multiple locations, which is useful if you have several rental destinations or boat storages. You can add any number of them via the Locations tab.
Step 5: Customize rental availability
Use the Schedules section to add customizable schedules for you and your employees and specify desired booking rules. You’ll need to choose an employee, and location, and add information about availability to your timetable. It includes:
- Days of the week;
- Periods of time;
- Activity (Working hours, lunchtime, or break);
- Accessible locations;
- Days off & custom working days.
Step 6: Add boats to your site’s inventory
During this step, you’ll need to add the actual boats you plan to rent out. This can be done by navigating to the Services tab and adding any amount of boats you want to offer your customers. Here you can provide information about:
- Rental price;
- Boat availability;
- Buffer time;
- Group booking option;
- Min & max capacity for group bookings;
- Deposit payments etc.
Learning how to rent out your boat also requires proper vessel categorization. The latter is possible due to the plugin’s support of custom tags and categories. For example, you can create categories for fishing boats, sailboats, and yachts. Tags will offer extra information about each boat to your site visitors. This feature is available in the Service Categories and Service Tags tabs.
Step 7: Set up email notifications
Notifying the clients who rented your boat is an essential functionality for any boat rental site. With the Appointment Booking plugin, you can set up email notifications after placing or canceling the booking, completing the payment, and before/after the rental. The plugin provides an editable template with tag support. Besides, you can send each email notification to multiple recipients after specifying their addresses. The plugin also supports SMS notification functionality (a paid add-on is required).
Step 8: Add the booking wizard form to your website.
The final step of learning how to rent out your boat & configuring the Appointment Booking plugin requires adding the booking wizard to your boat rental website. If you use Gutenberg for website customization, just navigate to the necessary page in the builder and add the Appointment Form block to it. Additionally, you can copy and insert the form shortcode to make it visible in a widget area, sidebar, or nearly anywhere else.
To further improve your boat rental website, you can add even more helpful tools, for example:
- Image galleries to show your boat, team, and location.
- Event calendar plugin to show any specific events like tours or excursions in the calendar format.
- Contact form plugins.
- Plugins for SEO and performance improvement.
- Weather widget.
Choosing a Rental Platform
Surely, WordPress is a time-tested CMS that can help you create an online presence for your business in no time. However, it requires time and certain investments to configure everything and promote your website. If you want to get started right away, you can go for any of the popular boat rental platforms that already provide all the tools you need. Designed to simplify the whole process of multi-day rentals, they allow you to rent out your boat in a few minutes. Below we have gathered 5 websites built to boost your boat’s rental potential.
Click & Boat
For those who don’t want to bother with setting up a website for boat rental, Click & Boat is probably one of the best suggestions. It operates on a sharing economy model. This means you will be able to rent out a boat only when it’s not in use. Thanks to the site’s accessible UI and full dedication to safety, you won’t have any trouble using the platform and renting out your boat or yacht. Additionally, the site has an option for customer reviews to help potential renters make proper decisions on every boat option.
Pros:
- Quick boat registration;
- Easy listing editing;
- Efficient booking & payment management;
- Global platform availability;
- Publicly visible reviews.
Cons:
- High commission percentage;
- Partial refunds.
| Name | Established in | Commission | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Click & Boat | 2013 | up to 23% | 4.4 |
Boatsetter
If you want to know how to rent out your boat quickly via a ready-made platform, Boatsetter can help. This platform works similarly to Click & Boat by connecting boat owners and renters in a few clicks. The website supports a wide range of boats for renting out, from yachts to sailboats. Additionally, Boatsetter supports boating destinations all over the US, allowing any registered user to connect & reserve a boat in no time.
Pros:
- Flexible rental options;
- Easy-to-use UI;
- Over 600 available locations;
- Support for renter reviews & community assistance.
Cons:
- High commissions;
- US-only boating locations;
- Slow support response time.
| Name | Established in | Commission | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boatsetter | 2012 | 10-35% | 4.7 |
GetMyBoat
Another popular website to charter a boat or rent it out is GetMyBoat. It provides users worldwide with a flexible scheduling system and an extensive selection of boat types. Based on your location, you can quickly find a charter option nearby depending on the search settings and answer the question “How can I rent my boat out?” Besides, the platform provides multiple boating destinations to choose from if you don’t know where to start. Additionally, it provides a quick start if you want to know how to rent out your boat.
Pros:
- Intuitive UI and clean design;
- 184+ boating destinations;
- Captained & bareboat rentals;
- Customizable group size for renters.
Cons:
- No proof of boat owner accountability;
- No partial payments.
| Name | Established in | Commission | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| GetMyBoat | 2013 | up to 10.5% | 4.9 |
Sailo
As a global boat rental marketplace, Sailo connects boat owners and renters to allow for easy & quick charters. With over 30,000 boats, yachts, and catamarans, this platform provides an extensive inventory and support for bareboat and captained rentals. Unlike other solutions on the list, it comes with a concierge service to assist with boat reservations. This feature also provides personalized recommendations to registered users.
Pros:
- Easy location-based boat search;
- Over 500 supported locations for boat rentals;
- Insurance options for boat owners and renters;
- Multiple boat search options.
Cons:
- The boat owner is responsible for tax payments;
- Uses a third-party platform for refund management.
| Name | Established in | Commission | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sailo | 2014 | 14% | 4.9 |
SamBoat
SamBoat is another mention on our list for those asking “How can I rent my boat out?” As a user-friendly platform, it can help you rent out your boat without a hassle. Available in 9 languages, the website, provides multiple options for destinations and boat rentals. Furthermore, SamBoat provides easy access to the dashboard for boat owners, allowing them to easily manage their boats and overview bookings.
Pros:
- Diverse boat search filters;
- Multiple supported boat types;
- Easy access to popular boat models for rent;
- SamBoat Club with discounts and specials.
Cons:
- High rental commission;
- Only partial refunds (unless canceled in less than 5 days before the rental starts).
| Name | Established in | Commission | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| SamBoat | 2013 | 20% | 4.9 |
Conclusion
Renting out a boat allows you to do what you love while getting some money out of it. With multiple ways of establishing a boat rental business online, you can easily get started even if you own a small center console boat for fishing. Besides, as rental businesses continue to grow, boat rentals will become even more relevant, especially for travelers looking for an affordable way to spend their vacation. Now that you already know how to rent out your boat but are still doubting because of the risks, these benefits can help you make the decision:
- Extra income: One of the main advantages of renting out a boat is a steady stream of additional income. It can reduce the costs of boat ownership and even provide you with an opportunity to expand your business in the future.
- Utilization: If you don’t use your boat frequently and don’t want it to remain idle all the time, you may decide to rent out a boat for it to be used more often. However, don’t forget that regular boat usage also means regular maintenance and may also require inspections and checks for all your boats from time to time.
- Flexibility: While your boat can be rented, no one stops you from using it for your enjoyment. This provides certain flexibility and will allow you to pursue your boat-related hobbies especially if you’re still learning how to rent out your boat.
- Tax benefits: Finally, providing your boat for rental results in tax advantages. As a business owner, you’ll be able to deduct certain costs that are related to the boat’s expenses, from insurance to repairs.
