Who is tomorrow’s boater?

This article was also published in Marina World'sThe State of Marinas 2026. Click here to read the online version.

The industry’s widening engagement gap was neatly expressed by NMMA’s CEO Frank Hugelmeyer in his address at this year’s Discover Boating Miami International Boat Show as “a changing and ageing demographic, alongside a whole new generation that shops, buys and consumes information and media very, very differently”.

At industry events, national “state of the industry” reports are confidently held up, citing economic impact, employment numbers, berths and boater numbers, and sales of boat units. However, panels appear to shuffle sheepishly around the great unmentionables: the mystery of tomorrow’s boater, together with the challenge of reaching them and the persistent shadow of reputational elitism.

That said, in order to identify solutions, you must first identify the problem. In order to identify the problem, you must have the tools to do so. And, at a very basic level, many countries simply don't have good data concerning the demographics of their boating community.

While some larger marina chains might be tech-savvy and have good customer data, one often has to rely on anecdotal evidence for smaller marinas, which, critically, still make up a huge and valuable share of the global marina industry.

Inside the boating feedback loop

David Cusworth is Savvy Navvy's head of partnership and innovation, and is a lifelong sailor. He laments the fact that boating seems so misunderstood. 

“The imagery and the emotion involved in boating is so powerful, you’d assume it would just attract people. Getting out on the water provides such peace of mind and spirit that you can’t help but relax and forget about all your worries on dry land. We seem to expect everyone to understand that.”

The company is keen to overcome barriers to boating and recognises that the surrounding narrative isn’t always conducive to attracting a wider audience. Cusworth describes being invited to judge a marketing category about product launch at a boat show. 

“I viewed dozens of virtually indistinguishable entries: $300,000 motor yachts, top of the range, drone footage, a slim mum in a bikini, great-looking kids in sunglasses, dad rushing to finish work and putting down his smartphone to spend quality time on board as they all head off into the sunset. It felt like an industry caught in its own echo chamber.”

Various national organisations are currently conducting studies to identify barriers to boating and to understand what might attract and retain newcomers. This includes a comprehensive study, now in its final phase, commissioned by the German Motoring Club (ADAC) regarding recreational boaters. An official registration and service body, ADAC offers skippers a digital portal and app with marina guides, weather data, route planning and tracking functions, and provides advisory support to its members.

Although it is difficult to determine the precise total number of boats in Germany due to overlapping registration requirements and institutions, most boat owners are understood to be men over 60 and only 11 percent are under 40. Beyond establishing reliable baseline data, ADAC’s study also aims to gain a better understanding of usage patterns, ownership structures, regional distribution, generational differences and the economic significance of recreational boating.

Luxury taxes and legacy protocols

Su Lin Cheah has authored ICOMIA’s “Pathways in Asia” report, which provides a welcome perspective on a lesser-known yet high-potential market. Cheah highlights how outdated shipping laws, high luxury taxes and insufficient infrastructure in hubs like Hong Kong stifle growth, while documenting a vast “unregistered” local boating population often ignored by global yachting statistics. She also notes that progress is slowed by legacy commercial shipping laws that fail to account for the practicalities of recreational boating.

This is echoed by the new chair of Global Marine Business Advisors, Richard Haws, based in the Middle East. He describes the frustration of being hampered by legacy commercialism when trying to get out on the water during his early years in Saudi Arabia.

Despite ticking every motivational box as a potential boat owner, his experience encountering minimal digital resources and lack of promotion, compounded by restrictive legacy protocols, represented a total systemic failure to welcome new users. “If boating is this hard to do”, he shrugs, “why do it?”

According to Guillaume Arnauld des Lions, deputy CEO of the French Federation of Nautical Industries, one of the top barriers perceived by both actual and potential boaters is the stress generated by the responsibilities of ownership, such as maintenance, insurance and other relentless logistics. He summarises that the primary mission today is to demonstrate that boating can be easy and accessible.

Furthermore, according to a study first presented at last year’s Nautic show in Paris, 61 percent of the French public still consider limited access to berthing infrastructure to be a deterrent, despite “the famously long waiting lists of a decade ago having been largely mitigated by the integration of dry stacks and dynamic berthing methods”.

Having surveyed some 2,000 people in the general public and 2,000 active boaters, the research identified 2.3 million frequent boaters and 9.7 million occasional boaters, giving an impressive total of roughly 12 million boaters. However, the research identified only 3.6 million “aspirants”, defined as keen to engage but are currently shore-bound.

The inclusion imperative

Exposing the industry’s cultural disconnect, The Magenta Project has just issued a major wake-up call regarding female inclusion. “In a time of crisis for the boating industry,” asks CEO Victoria Low, “how much sense does it make to ignore 50 percent of the population?” 

Following the landmark 2019 World Sailing Trust’s “Women in Sailing Strategic Review”, a fresh study prepared by The Magenta Project in collaboration with 11th Hour Racing and World Sailing calls out “persistent discrimination, exclusion and inequity across the broader sailing community and marine industry”. 

A lack of equal pay, perceived absence in leadership and failure to support reporting structures for violence, abuse or harassment, count amongst embedded cultural norms that urgently need redress.

Victoria Low points to the benefit of learning from successful examples in other areas of sport such as World Rugby's implementation of government reforms linking diversity targets to organisational performance, which has led to increased female leadership representation. She recognises that voluntary progress alone is often insufficient and that external support or incentives, together with better data tracking and accountability, might be necessary to drive change in the largely volunteer-driven ecosystem.

Clubs represent one of the top entry points to boating, building valuable skills in a safe and social environment amongst young people and adult beginners. That gender discrimination should continue to create additional barriers is both wrong and wilfully short-sighted.

What is the way forward?

If these anecdotal examples are anything to go by, it might not be too fatalistic to even question if there is a “tomorrow’s boater” at all. Older generations are hanging on, but middle generations are getting squeezed and younger generations are put off by cost, complication and discrimination.

The question of why major efforts haven’t been consistently and uniformly invested to this end is now significant. In tourism theory, segmenting and tracking the market is not just a marketing exercise but rather a foundational requirement for sustainable growth and competitiveness.

To avoid mediocrity in a highly competitive industry, destination operators need to carefully segment the market, evaluate where they can offer value, design the appropriate services and products, and, importantly, contextualise their offering by infusing the wider promotion of the destination with a curated sense of place and cultural identity.

For example, many potential future boaters might desire access to landscapes, nature, achieving a sense of freedom and switching off. Boating might therefore benefit from being marketed as more of a support vehicle and enabler to achieve a more abstract motive, such as escaping from the stresses of everyday life.

Jon White, general manager of The Yacht Harbour Association in the UK, recalls challenging his council with the notion that marinas might need to consider a very different operating model in the future. The question referred to the new reality of younger demographics, a far cry from the traditionally older, male boater whose recreation has been singularly boat-focused for decades. He references the “sleeping giant” and urges a coordinated effort to look ahead and develop a strategy to sustain the industry in the long term.

"Nothing new is going to happen if everyone agrees!" 

The 2025-28 ‘Boating Finland’ project represents the first integrated effort to unite the Finnish boating industry, water tourism and academic research. While Finland is world-renowned for quality boat brands and has one of the highest ratios of boat ownership per inhabitant in the world, the boating and tourism ecosystems have historically operated in silos.

The concept was introduced by Elina Viitanen and Juhani Haapaniemi of PookiPro Management. In collaboration with Finnboat and Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, Boating Finland connects diverse stakeholders to recognise friction points - such as the national return to school in mid-August in prime tourism season - and build capacity around facilitating sustainable access to the country’s extraordinary boating landscape.

One of the project's first initiatives was to take a group of 12 researchers to boot Düsseldorf, where a snowdome-style immersive research space was created. This installation introduced visitors to the Finnish archipelago boating experience while collecting insights on their perceptions. Viitanen was encouraged by the researchers’ response to their findings and noted their fascination at encountering a professional dialect they couldn't parse, rendered entirely flummoxed by the technical talk.

It’s early days for Boating Finland, yet the project is already generating positive outcomes with innovative collaborations starting to take shape. Viitanen is optimistic about the results, despite envisaging tricky moments ahead resolving conflicts between distinct visions.

"Nothing new is going to happen if everyone agrees!" she laughs.

Getting started with serious data

Idan Cohen, co-driver of ICOMIA Marina Group’s “Smart Marina” workstream, envisages the eventual take-up of a common language system that would manage boating traffic between the world’s marinas, much like those employed by aviation and hospitality.

Benefitting boaters with ease of use, marinas with facilitated check-ins and the industry with a globally connected digital infrastructure, this would generate a wealth of useful intelligence of boater demographics without adding to the jobs list. First collecting and accessing data about boater demographics is essential to unpicking the problems lurking between the numbers and getting to work on the solutions.

Gathering rigorous data across the fragmented global boating ecosystem - and in a way that doesn’t just harmonise efforts to deliver a much-needed framework for data generation but also addresses how marinas can better attract future generations - might follow the lead of the research community who balances technical standardisation with cultural reciprocity.

The FAIR principles employed in research ensure that intelligence is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable across borders. In very diverse socio-cultural-economic landscapes, of which this industry is a perfect example, these are increasingly paired with the CARE principles to encourage long-term trust and community participation. These are: collective benefit, authority to control (data sovereignty), responsibility and ethics.

Using data to prove social utility could help a marina readjust its perceived role within its local area and bring future generations into boating, evolving from a private enclosure for wealthy yacht owners into a shared asset. Examples might include using pedestrian flow data to improve waterfront access for residents, sharing real-time data of public-access resources such as short-stay berths, electric charging points or community kayak and dinghy storage, or demonstrating environmental responsibility by sharing water-quality, sea-level or biodiversity data. This more porous approach could open a number of doors.  

The first proposals for a new model to attract "tomorrow’s boater" may not come in the form of a blanket set of guidelines, but as collaborative and supportive efforts linking local identity and an inclusive "active-access" philosophy that simultaneously address serious barriers to entry such as complication and discrimination.

This approach could ease newcomers in by matching boating to interests they already know and enjoy, such as photography, wellness, watersports or tourism, and using these markets as a pathway into long-term boating on a win-win basis for all stakeholders.