Boating is big business in the U.S.: spending on recreational boats and related costs totaled well over $35 billion in 2014 (latest figures available), with nearly 36% of Americans taking to the water at least once, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association. Given the considerable resources that tend to attend most leisure boaters, you’d think that booking a slip for a weekend trip from, say, Newport to Martha’s Vineyard would be snap to do online, or at least with a quick phone call to the nearest port. As it happens, nothing could be further from the truth—that is, until now. Enter Dockwa, a unified booking and marketing platform that connects boaters to marinas in real time, and is making a spur-of-the-moment escape on the high seas smooth sailing.
Dockwa CEO and cofounder Mike Melillo (far right) and his team are shaking up the boating industry... [+]
Launched in the summer of 2014 in Newport, Rhode Island, Dockwa is the brainchild of CEO and co-founder Mike Melillo, 27, an entrepreneur who briefly played professional baseball for the Milwaukee Brewers before moving to the rarefied coastal enclave.
“There’s a lot of money exchanged between boaters and marinas—it’s not an inexpensive hobby, especially when you consider the uncertainty presented by the elements,” says Melillo. Armed with his idea to simplify slip-booking for boaters, he picked the brain of a local dockmaster to find out how the process worked, and was shocked to discover how antiquated it was. Say you’re a boater who’d like to visit Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend from Newport, and you make the call to a local marina on Thursday night requesting a slip. Chances are the dockmaster won’t get the message until the next morning—and once he helps the boats presently in the marina get going that day, he might not reply until that afternoon. At that point you’ve likely called off your trip, as you’re not going to spend a few hundred dollars on fuel getting to Martha’s Vineyard if you don’t know you’ll definitely have a place to dock that night. Melillo found that there were anywhere between 20 and 35 touchpoints from the time a boater expressed interest in docking at a marina and when he was tied up in a slip. The opportunity, as he saw it, was to reduce those touchpoints to two, while still giving the marina complete control as to who ties up there on a given day.
The Dockwa app does just that, allowing boaters to explore regions and marinas up and down the Eastern seaboard (and beyond), select a destination, and request a slip or mooring, all from their mobile device. Once the marina approves the reservation, payment is processed seamlessly through the app. Dockwa also offers 24/7 support to both boaters and marinas. It’s the only company in its space with venture backing from sources including Boston-based Matrix Partners and Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan, and the only one with a lock on the most desirable marinas in Nantucket, Newport, Block Island, and Martha’s Vineyard—coveted havens for luxury boaters in the 40- to 50-feet range, Dockwa’s target audience.
With a network of nearly 250 participating marinas so far, Dockwa is making booking a slip up and... [+]
The platform is making serious waves in the boating industry. Last October, Dockwa announced a partnership with BoatUS, the largest membership boating group in the country with over 500,000 active users, which has played an integral part in growing the brand. It recently nixed booking fees for boaters (while marinas pay only credit-card processing fees)—instead, revenues will come from expanding its marina-facing software solutions to include new features that they can use to optimize their operations. For example, a marina can pay for top billing on the app in a particular market (think
Dockwa’s network of marinas now numbers close to 250 (and counting) and stretches from Maine to the Bahamas and the Caribbean, including both the U.S. and British Virgin Islands—and soon, the Midwest’s Great Lakes, where the company is turning its attention. On March 1, it will launch a new instant-booking service at Edgartown Harbor on Martha’s Vineyard, which will allow boaters to book a slip immediately, without having to wait for approval from the marina. Melillo expects at least 10% of Dockwa’s members to follow suit by summer—a big shift in an industry where many marinas were hesitant to expose their inventory days or weeks in advance.
Dockwa is hoping its user-friendly, image-rich interface will help attract millennials to boating.... [+]
And Dockwa is expanding its reach in other ways. The platform’s highly visual interface, brimming with striking images of idyllic hamlets up and down the East Coast, reflects the commitment of Melillo and his 11-member team to elevating the user experience—and to luring the all-important millennial demographic onto the high seas.
“Our goal is to put a fresh face on an industry that has a very hard time attracting this age group,” he says. “We’re hellbent on making boating appealing to a younger audience, and we’re in a prime position to do it.” To that end, the Dockwa team is developing travel content, including weekend guides, to draw boaters to events and destinations they might not know about—giving marinas exposure on their platform and boaters a reason to get out on the water more. Says Melillo, “We want the Dockwa customer experience to become the industry standard.”
