Tuesday, October 03, 2006

On the web: Renting a boat just got easier

Last spring, a friend of mine sent me an email and said "where can I rent a boat for the weekend just like the one I used to own?" I know he used to own a 28' Maxum express cruiser, because I helped him pick it out 10 years ago and spent many fun days on that boat before buying a similar boat in 1999. Not knowing of any popular boat renting agencies in the Long Island Sound area, I set out on the web to find my friend a boat to rent.

In my search, I found plenty of boat charters available out of New London, CT, or Newport, but most were fishing captains for hire. A nice service, but not what he was looking for. Many of the results I found under a search for "boat charter" on google were for the Caribbean or Greece or other exotic locations where you can enjoy a bareboat cruise and go island hopping. Again, nice, but not what we were looking for here.. There were plenty of timeshares-for-yacht services advertised on the web, but most of them seem to be for sailboats - I know this guy is a powerboater. Also, they all want you to "buy in" for a year, or a lifetime, and my friend - who recently had his 4th kid - only needed a boat for a weekend. Besides, the closest service of this kind was out of Stamford, CT, and he was looking for something closer to Mystic.

Anyway, I sent him a couple of links that I finally found and forgot about it... Until he sent me an email last week telling me how that company I sent him was in the news for their unique service and rapid growth. I said, "What company?", as I didn't remember what website I had actually sent him. Apparently, I sent him a link to BoatRenting.com where he found a 38' cabin cruiser that he was able to rent for a 3-day weekend right near his home. He said the price was reasonable, the boat was everything promised by the renter, and the transaction was easy as pie (Where did that saying come from? I've never made a pie - it doesn't seem easy to me).

So, if you need to rent a boat for the weekend, you can search Google for hours and look at a hundred different websites like I did last spring, or you can visit BoatRenting.com and find a boat to rent.

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