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Roydon Marina Village uses online booking system

Roydon Marina Village in Essex has almost completed its £3.2 million development phase, which is set to offer narrow boat and leisure cruisers a first class service, amongst the attractive rural settings of the Lee Valley Park. It is set to become the largest berthing location in the South East and the first on the River for a hundred years, but faced a challenge when it came to costs to implement traditional and often complex marina management systems and hardware.

Inspired by the government attempts at reducing IT spending across councils, James White, The manager of Roydon Marina Village and also the site’s prestigious holiday lodges decided to explore whether ‘cloud computing’ could provide a better solution.

“We had a system for organising the site’s lodges based on Hotel management software, but wanted something more tailored for our boatowners,” explains James, who heard about the new state-of-the-art website thewaypoint.com and was able to take full advantage of its advanced features, such as its simple to operate management system and marketing platform. The Waypoint not only allows James to manage permanent and visitor berths but also to better utilise them and increase margins through more efficient occupancy, even when permanent berths are only vacant for a night or two.

The system is also cost efficient for a new marina such as Roydon, with no upfront costs in the first year. The Waypoint only takes commission on visitor revenue driven by the application and Marinas are also able to capitalise on out-of-hours visitor enquires too, as the site can accept payments online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Plus customers will benefit from The Waypoints’ £100,000 marketing spend which will actively promote partner marinas to boat owners nationally, who will be able to search for and book vacant berths online in participating marinas.

Charles Bacon, co-founder of The Waypoint says, “By basing our system on the Internet we benefit from a number of advantages over the typical database or office whiteboard, by updating vacancies online the whole boating world can now find out about. The Waypoint not only acts as a management tool, but it also allows visiting boaters to book and pay for berths securely online and additionally allows annual berthing tenants to easily inform the marina operator when they are leaving and coming back. This means that managers such as James can improve occupancy at their marinas all year round whilst boat owners can potentially get a cut of any visitor income earned while they are away.”

CLICK HERE to visit the Waypoint website

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