SailEazy

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When you charter a sailing multihull, the time spent getting to grips with it, figuring out the recommendations for its use and, above all, going through the inventory, can be pretty tedious. Usually, you’ll be casting off for a long weekend or a week, but that’s not too serious: such rental periods correspond, say, to a weekend joined up to a public holiday, or a short vacation that you can organize well in advance (you might often book 3 to 6 months ahead). But to be able to sail whenever you want throughout the year, you need to be an owner, which is not an option for everyone. There are, of course, sailing schools and clubs, but these lack autonomy and privacy. What’s more, you have to stick to pre-established programs and schedules. All these frustrating options limit the possibilities of “à la carte” sailing.

Grégoire Guignon has made this observation throughout his life as a yachtsman. Having inherited the sailing bug from his father, and begun a career in civil engineering, he often chartered sailboats with family or friends to enjoy some fun cruising. But not being a racing sailor, shorter trips were very rare. In 2012, he decided to retrain for a new career at Kedge Business School. As part of his MBA, the latter half of his studies focused on the collaborative economy, where he identified the lack of a more flexible, fast and user-friendly sailboat rental system. Then, discovering there were just 250,000 registered sailboats that hardly sail at all (some just a few days a year according to statistics), yet four million active yachtsmen, he decided it was high time to react. He presented his charter fleet-sharing project, and this met with great interest. This type of initiative already exists among manufacturers such as Bénéteau, with its Boat Club, or Dream Yacht Worldwide, which has made an attempt in this direction, but Grégoire’s concept was refined around key ideas: ultra-flexibility on a half-hourly basis and the support of a team of professionals there at either end of the users’ vacations and who deal with fleet maintenance. With hard-hitting arguments such as a highly tailored hourly rate and an annual sailboat usage rate multiplied by 30, meaning boats are no longer stuck to the pontoons, he had what it took for a convincing project. Bingo - the city of Marseille showed interest and allocated three berths in its Vieux-Port to the young entrepreneur. In 2015, with this pilot project, he created SailEazy.

A Winning Formula

The timing was just right in a global market reaching maturity in terms of shared use. We were well into the era of self-service bicycle and car rental, and the digitalization of online reservation systems. Firmly rooted in this dynamic, SailEazy was winning over customers and expanding. In 2018, a round of fundraising enabled the structure of this new service to be developed. A smartphone booking app was created, and the purchase of a few units, including the famous Tricat 30, grew ...