Boats are expensive, hard to maintain. These companies let you rent with ease in Myrtle Beach
Boats cost thousands of dollars to buy, maintain and gas up. The price tag alone makes the concept of ever owning one, or getting to use one on a regular basis, an out-of-reach luxury for many people.
Not to mention the fact that boat prices have shot up during the pandemic — like everything else — due to inflation and short supply from manufacturers.
The cost of boat ownership is so infamous that there’s even a saying to describe it: “A boat is a hole in the water you throw your money in.”
But in Myrtle Beach — across South Carolina’s coastline, really — getting on the water is almost a necessity to life, for both locals and visitors. There are plenty of famous beaches, in fact, that are only accessible by boat. And those beaches — Bird Island, Bald Head Island and the like — are a perfect way to escape the crowds that fill up the rest of the coastline each summer.
Two companies, Freedom Boat Club and GetMyBoat, want to make boating more accessible for everyone, not just for the rich. And, in fact, they take many of the stressors about boating away and handle them themselves. Maintenance? They handle it. Rigging? They handle it. Insurance? Done.
While the companies operate in slightly different ways — Freedom Boat Club has a monthly membership model with unlimited rentals and GetMyBoat charges per trip, by the hour — together they represent a growing trend of making boat ownership no longer a requirement of getting to use a boat on a regular basis.
“The members really like the fact that they don’t have to do anything. They just walk on the docks, and five minutes later they’re out on the water,” said Karen Berry, operations vice president for Freedom Boat Club of the Grand Strand.
How each company works
Freedom Boat Club works off of a membership model, almost like that of a gym. Members pay an initial fee of several thousand dollars and then a few hundred dollars each month after that, Berry said.
Costs vary depending on the type of membership, such as how many boats a member wants to rent each month or the days of the week they want to rent. (Weekday memberships are sometimes cheaper than memberships that cover the weekend, for example.) And, every time a member goes out, they pay for the gas the boat uses.
The initial price tag might look high — easily upwards of $5,000 for the first year. But that’s a far cry from the cost of owning an actual boat, which can be in the tens of thousands of dollars over the course of the boat’s lifetime, from the initial purchase to maintenance to storage.
With Freedom Boat Club, there’s no maintenance cost for the customer, and the boat is ready to set sail minutes after a customer arrives at the dock. Another benefit is that members can choose from any of the club’s boats at any time. Boaters can go out on a pontoon one day and a speedboat the next. The club allows people to use hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars worth of boats all year round while paying a fraction of the cost.
“A lot of previous boat owners in the club tell us they use our boats way more than they ever use their own, just because we make it so simple,” Berry said.
On Wednesday morning, several boaters heading out echoed Berry’s comments. All of them retirees, they said they appreciated the ease of using the boats and getting to use different ones depending on how many guests they had with them, from a fishing boat to a pontoon.
“I’ve lived on the water. You see all these boats, (and) it’s too late in life to buy one,” said Sandy Maccaferri, who is retired and was heading out with her “boat sisters” Nancy Hocutt and Barbara Dean. “This was a perfect solution.”
Meanwhile, GetMyBoat describes itself as an “Airbnb of boats.” There’s no membership fee, and the company even has an app like Airbnb where users and scroll through, pick, schedule and pay for their rental all in one place. Rentals are by the hour and can cost as little as $20 for a kayak rental to as much as $450 for a sunset sailboat cruise.
The other big difference is that most of the “rentals” offered on GetMyBoat are actually chartered trips, where a U.S. certified Coast Guard captain pilots the boat for the customers.
“Making more travel and leisure experiences more accessible has really been — that has been huge,” said GetMyBoat marketing manager Val Streif, noting how the pandemic has made people want more flexibility with their vacations. “Boating doesn’t have to be this like luxury thing. You don’t have to have a friend with you to take you out. You can rent what you want when you want it.”
A growing trend
Neither company is extremely new. Freedom Boat Club is about 30 years old, originating in Sarasota, Florida, and GetMyBoat is a tech startup that launched in 2013. However, both companies have seen major growth in the last couple of years as boats, like cars, have faced manufacturing delays and shortages.
Streif said her company’s business has grown tenfold in the last two years. Part of that growth, Streif said, came from people seeking more outdoor experiences in light of the pandemic.
“We’re making it easier for people to find affordable rentals without committing to actually owning a boat,” Streif said. “The last two years when we’ve seen the most significantly crazy growth.”
Berry said Freedom Boat Club had seen similar “booming” growth with its customer base tripling in the last two years. Across the four locations in the Grand Strand area, which stretches from Murrells Inlet to Southport, N.C., Freedom Boat Club has about 700 members.
“They go enjoy their day on the water. When they’re done, they come back, pay for the gas, pass us the keys and head on home,” Berry said. “We take care of all the maintenance, all the insurance, all the upkeep so they can just spend their time boating and having fun.”
Accessibility
More than anything else, both of these boat rental companies stress that accessibility is at the core of their services.
Freedom Boat Club goes so far as to offer a variety of classes and certifications for its boaters to ensure they are ready to head out on the water on their own.
And those classes are included in the price of the membership. Most members typically do an online boater safety course followed by in-person classroom and on-the-water training with a certified captain.
“Usually, even brand new boaters feel pretty confident to take the boat out after that,” Berry said. “But if they don’t, then we do offer unlimited training. They can come back time and time again until they do get feeling comfortable behind the wheel.”
GetMyBoat doesn’t offer training like Freedom Boat Club, but it does require that all boat drivers — both owners and customers — meet all of the relevant certification requirements and regulations for their state.
If anything, Streif pointed out how GetMyBoat might make life even easier, since much of its boat “rentals” include a captain to drive the boat.
“During the pandemic, manufacturers were selling out because everyone wanted to own a boat, but it’s not going to be realistic for a lot of people. Boats are so expensive,” Streif said.
And new boat owners frequently find they are more busy than they expected, Streif said, and don’t use their boats as much as they once thought they would.
“I think it’s just a great way to keep it more accessible and just more kind of just sustainable in general, right?” Streif said. “We don’t need everyone to have their own boat. If you’re only going out a couple times a season, it’s great to have access to do what you want when you want it.”
