Bringing More Boaters to Your Marina

We’re always trying to attract more boaters to our marinas and having visited hundreds of marinas around the country over the last few years while completing dozens of marina market analyses, we’ve come up with a list of ideas that just might work for you.

While completing a survey of nearly 4,000 boaters on the Great Lakes for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, one of the questions we asked was which harbor was your favorite and why? One of the key lessons we learned was that transient boaters really focus on the quality of the destination, and just how easily they can get to the nearby shops, bars, restaurants, and other attractions. If you’re lucky enough to have a marina located right in the heart of a great waterfront in a popular location, you know how fortunate you are. If you’re not as close as you’d like to be, we suggest coming up with strategies for making it easier for your boaters to get to these attractions or bringing the attractions closer to you.

Partnering with Local Businesses
These strategies might include clearing the views from your slips to the shops, and/or building a trail or sidewalk to make it easier to find them and get there. Add signage and partner with local shops and restaurants to offer discounts and shuttle services. Many marinas have been very successful with bike loaner programs, and even e-bike rental programs when located near great trail networks that allow them to visit surrounding areas like state parks. One marina we’re working with owns a very popular bar and restaurant on the opposite side of the lake from the marina… a 25-minute drive in this case. To eliminate that drive, the marina is setting up a water taxi in partnership with the local city to share costs and create a new attraction that links the facility to a series of great destinations all around the lake. While it’s great for the seasonal and transient boaters, it’s also a great way to get non-boaters on the water and into the marina… where they see the boat club and boat rental facilities. Since it also links a series of public attractions like outdoor concert facilities, the cost is much more reasonable than you might think.

If you’re too far from the restaurants and nearby shopping areas, as is the case for a marina we recently visited on the Chesapeake Bay, you might have to bring the restaurants and food to your marina. As this can be expensive and potentially risky financially, this facility supplements a brick-and-mortar restaurant with visiting food trucks that rotate through the region on different nights. Imagine having a different “restaurant” on your site every night through the weekend, and all it costs you is some space in the parking lot. There are all kinds of food trucks out there, from Mexican to barbecue, cupcakes to ice cream, and even breakfast food trucks.

Broadening Your Amenities
In a smaller community or more remote location, we have seen many facilities start to offer a broader range of amenities for their clients. An idea quickly growing in popularity is adding overnight accommodations in the form of floating vacation rentals, cabins or rental cottages, “Glamping” (glamorous camping), RV sites, and even traditional camp sites. These options offer a range of opportunities to take advantage of your waterfront site and bring more people to your property. When combined with a marina, you end up with many more visitors who will spend money in your ship’s store, eat in your restaurant, rent your boats or kayaks, and get to know your facility.

One marina we’re working with is building an outdoor wedding venue to take advantage of their amazing sunset views and serene location for destination weddings. This venue can double as a small concert venue for local bands, with room for guests on land and visiting boaters to moor just offshore and enjoy the music. Along with the wedding venue is an indoor event center that is serviced by outside catering. The bride and groom can make a grand entrance by boat or sail away to their honeymoon suite in one of the onsite rental cottages.

Other amenities that can be highly profitable include kayak and paddlecraft rentals, and of course boat and personal watercraft rentals. One facility in Colorado we studied earns more revenue from rentals than they do from seasonal slip fees.

A swimming pool is something of a luxury, but one that can really make the difference between your marina and a competitor without one. Our local yacht club offers a great pool and outdoor dining next to the marina, and a majority of the club members join for the pool. Especially the younger members with young families that might not yet be able to have a pool at home or a boat in the marina.

What About Trailer Boaters?
Shifting gears completely, how can you attract boaters to your marina who would normally never use a marina at all? Many younger families, or maybe folks more interested in fishing and watersports than cruising or sailboat racing have smaller boats that they keep at home and launch at local boat ramps. Traditionally, these boaters arrive at the ramp, launch the boat, park the car and trailer in a lot full of empty vehicles, and head out into the lake for a day of fun. At the end of the day, they need a meal, a restroom, and maybe a place to sleep. Once they go to the trouble of hauling the boat out of the water, they’re in their vehicle and where do they go? Home. Not to your restaurant or anything else in your marina.

One of the more interesting and successful strategies we’re seeing is the addition of short-term transient shopper docks specifically targeting the trailer boating crowd. If we can give them a place to park the boat for free for an hour or two, they have time to get the kids off the lake, take a break, use the restroom, grab a meal and some ice cream, and maybe fuel up the boat and buy that new inflatable toy from the ship’s store. If there is a concert scheduled, they might decide to come back and see the show and rent a cabin to make a longer weekend out of the trip.

The idea is to broaden your amenities to give the boaters more things to do and keep them at your marina longer. While these can complicate your marina operations, many marinas are partnering with other local businesses to provide their services on the marina property. A kayak and paddleboard rental can be operated out of a trailer or converted shipping container by a separate vendor. Food truck owners are always looking for a good place to park with a captive market. Marina service providers can repair boats on your property as a separate tenant. There are companies out there that build “Glamp-grounds” in partnership with marinas and take care of all the headaches. Once they’re on site and managing the rentals, it’s a relatively simple step to managing on site cottages. Similarly, marina staff can manage cabins and campgrounds relatively easily, and there is great efficiency in sharing staff.

If there is anything in common with all of these various ideas, it is to creatively offer new things for your boaters to do or offer new reasons for non-boaters to come to your waterfront property. Find local partners from local businesses and work together to share resources so you can both be more successful.

Most of all, visit as many marinas as you can. You’ll be amazed at all the creative ways people are making their facilities more successful.

Greg Weykamp, ASLA, LEED AP, is president and principal at Edgewater Resources, LLC. He can be reached at gweykamp@edgewaterresources.com or by phone at 269-408-6562.