Anyone calling at a harbour on the Baltic Sea as a guest sailor in summer often worries about finding a free berth and routinely ends their sailing day early. Mooring apps are intended to solve this problem in future and at the same time relieve the workload of harbour masters in the office. All providers make it possible to book berths digitally even before entering the harbour. In practice, however, the changeover for guest sailors is currently leading to a complicated patchwork of different app providers.
Apps in the cockpit
On the German and Scandinavian Baltic Sea coasts, the systems currently share the most anny, boatpark, Harba, GoMarina, Dockspot and mySea the market. There are also smaller providers such as the start-up Dock24. For the travelling cruising sailor, this diversity means that they need several apps for a normal holiday trip. Skippers have to create separate profiles everywhere with the exact boat dimensions and enter their own payment details. Even large information portals such as the ADAC Skipper App only offer limited help here, as they forward the actual booking to the respective provider.
Reasons for the system jungle
The fact that there is no uniform standard is mainly due to the different software approaches of the providers. The majority of apps were originally developed as classic harbour and accounting systems for winter storage or permanent moorings and were only subsequently expanded to include an online module for day guests. As harbours often want to stick with their existing systems, the market for mooring systems is extremely competitive. Every app provider wants to provide the leading digital operating system for the marinas of the future and is trying to sign up as many harbours as possible across Europe.
The business models are usually based on a commission system, with hardly any fixed costs for the harbours. If a skipper pays his harbour fee via smartphone, part of the amount goes to the platform operator as a service fee. This is a principle that is already familiar from hotel providers such as Booking.com. The harbours can then decide for themselves whether or not to pass the costs on to customers. However, a major provider that is preparing to take over the market has not yet crystallised.
Chance of improvement
The lack of free boxes in the high season is often not just an infrastructure problem, but a question of distribution. This became apparent in the course of the Berth reports in the yacht. While harbours officially no longer have any free quotas, permanent berth holders are often away for longer periods of time. Technical solutions that make precisely these free capacities digitally accessible can provide relief at the harbours.
In the long term, the size and reach of the platforms is likely to determine their success, as small, purely regional solutions are almost impossible to finance in the long term. In the medium term, it is therefore foreseeable that a few large systems will prevail on the coasts.
To be continued
In part 2 of the article, we report on how harbour operators benefit from booking apps, while a third part provides an overview of how the various apps on the market work. Coming soon here on YACHT online.
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David Ingelfinger
Volontär
