Boat show cancellation over coronavirus pushes brokers to shift to virtual tours

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When Florida’s shelter-in-place order went into effect on April 3, one of the numerous impacted events was the Palm Beach International Boat Show, and the scheduled exhibitors had to quickly reexamine how to get their boats and products in front of customers.

The show typically has drawn exhibitors and attendees from around the world for five days of sales, networking and learning about the boating industry.

This year’s Palm Beach International Boat Show was originally scheduled for March 25 but has now been postponed twice with no current date scheduled.

“It’s a hard time to be a yacht broker,” Bob Denison, the president of Denison Yachting, told Fox News. “We’re selling things that people don’t really need. But boating, yachting is special. You can get out with the people you’re living with and get on the water.”

Boating is also a large industry in the United States and around the world. On the small scale, the delayed Palm Beach International Boat Show has a total statewide economic impact of $682.7 million and supports 4,394 full-time Florida jobs, according to the show’s producer.

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And speaking more broadly, the U.S. marine industry employs roughly 691,000 jobs across 35,000 businesses, according to the 2018 National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA) Boating Impact Study. These jobs and businesses include the whole supply chain, from manufacturing to dealers to marinas.

When the Palm Beach show was originally postponed, Denison was able to pivot his team’s time and budget into producing an online experience within six days. The plan is to host a virtual boat show for five days, every other Friday.

“They are structured [like an in-person boat show] to get customers on a bunch of different boats in the same category,” Denison said, “meet someone you trust and engage with someone face to face.”

With Day 1 and Day 2 in the books, the Denison team continues to make improvements to the user experience. By Day 2, the broker had added a live chat feature to speak one-on-one with a broker, 140 additional yacht videos, and an 8-hour livestream of the company president interviewing others in the industry (all remotely, of course).

“You’ll always want to feel, touch, smell the product before you buy it. There will always be that aspect,” Grant Henderson, sales director for Americas for the Italian shipyard Baglietto, told Fox News. Henderson joined the Day 1 livestream for a conversation that ranged from how the shipyard was doing to personal stuff. Just like it would’ve been on the docks.

“But it’s a great way to start meeting people and interacting with people and get those embarrassing questions out of the way; it’s just another way to get people into boating,” Henderson said. “There’s a lot of value to that.”

Video walk-throughs of boats large and small are hardly new but are becoming increasingly important as in-person showings get harder. Denison Yachting has a library with hundreds of walk-through videos and is working to get more completed with a skeleton video crew.

The Taiwan-built Hylas sailing yachts just launched its newest model: the H60. The builder had already offered online walk-throughs of the model using Matterport technology. But, in the last month, the company has supplemented those walkthroughs with screen-sharing with a broker or a virtual walk-through with a service guy armed with an iPad on the docks.

“The tricky part is gauging the interest,” Kevin Wensley of Hylas told Fox News. “Vetting them on the yacht is a great way to engage with them.”

Dutch shipyard Heesen intended to display its new 180-foot Laurentia at Palm Beach. Instead, the yard is opting for a video tour filmed before the show was originally postponed. The yard hopes to recreate that in-person touch.

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“We will create a video tour using footage that we recently shot on board the boat in St. Lucia, in addition to the interview with the designer [Ramon Alonso from Radyca] and [sales director for the Americas] Thom Conboy,” said Sara Gioanola, Heesen’s PR manager. “We’d like to give our audience the feeling of being taken around the yacht and hear firsthand from the designer and Thom about the great onboard features.”

Despite the high-tech features on most new boats, the industry as a whole has been slow to adopt online marketing and digital tools.

“The virtual boat show was a preview likely of a future of many industries and maybe our industry,” Tim Hamilton of the German shipyard Lurssen told Fox News. “Our industry has been adopting at a steady -- but not quick -- pace digital. There have been more brokers and builders doing videos and 3D scans of their boats.”

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But boat shows are about access, about connecting sellers with possible buyers and about answering questions about the marine industry that will get more people out on the water, so virtual shows could be the way to reach people who aren’t near a show.

“We want to keep doing past quarantine time, yes,” Denison said. “There is an audience who doesn’t want to make the fiscal or time commitment to come down to a boat show. This way they can explore and shop in a way that doesn’t take a lot of time or money.”