Boost in efficiency and profitability with automated dynamic pricing and Revenue Management Suite

The Company

Yacht Starship operates three different brands - Yacht Starship, Pirate Water Taxi and The Lost Pearl - running through the canals of Tampa Bay and Clearwater, with multiple boats in their fleet.

The brands each have a different look and feel, and target market.

Yacht Starship is an upscale experience with parties and full food and beverage service. Charter packages and weddings are important drivers of revenue.

The Lost Pearl is a big red pirate ship, geared towards a fun experience for kids.

Pirate Water Taxi is more utility based, running an hourly charter with no drinks or kitchen.

Despite their differences, each run their entire operation through RocketRez end-to-end cloud platform, making particular use of the custom ticketing rules for operators running a fleet of passenger vessels.

RocketRez helped Yacht Starship elevate their online sales, automate customer communications and improve connectivity in the field. The responsive cloud system connects all point-of-sale devices back to a central dashboard – which is important when your vessels are separated by miles of water.

With a host of new capabilities and streamlined operations, Yacht Starship’s Operations Manager Jacquelyn Ketner looked to RocketRez to help improve their capabilities in revenue management.

The Challenge

Manual Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing is a strategy of changing the price of a product or service to reflect different market conditions affecting demand. Jacquelyn, like many operators we meet, maintains a lot of information used to make actionable pricing decisions all within her head.

“It’s about forecasting with the trends. Is there a lot going on in town? Is it a holiday? Is it going to rain? Is it going to thunderstorm? All of this affects demand for specific cruises. Dynamic Pricing was new to me, and I was actually manually Dynamic Pricing before. Every time we wanted to increase the price for a specific day or a specific cruise, I was going into the system and keeping track of that myself through a price override. I had a big notebook filled with the information!”

Boat tours have the very clear, but highly volatile, effect of the weather to manage.

Looking at the weather for the week, you must be prepared for unpredictable forces to cause demand for a cruise to drop to zero, or combine with another factor, like a sporting event or convention, to drive enough walk-up traffic to fill three boats with ease.

This affects Yacht Starship’s pricing decisions. There is a clear opportunity to capture additional profit by adjusting ticket prices on the highest demand days.

As mentioned, Jacquelyn had been calculating and executing this manually – which was no easy task.

“It was literally going day-by-day. We’d see this boat is getting close to selling out – let's increase our price. The other boat’s getting close - let’s do it again! It was a full-time job.”

Setting Sail with Confidence

Red and White Fleet’s partnership with RocketRez underscores how technology can transform even the most established businesses. By integrating ticketing, payments, and client management into one cohesive system, RocketRez ensures they are equipped to handle growth without missing a beat.

As Sophia concluded, "RocketRez helps us make sure our time slots are available to our OTAs… and they're pushing it out to their customers." It’s this kind of precision and reliability that sets RocketRez apart.

Ready to transform your operations and set sail toward a brighter future? Discover how RocketRez can help your business.