Streamlining Yacht Hire with a Quote Builder Tool

Borrow A Boat is a global marketplace offering yacht rentals from a fleet of 35,000 boats. With most customers being repeat clients who prefer personalized service, the Charter Agents at Borrow A Boat (BAB) needed a tool to quickly generate customized quotes and respond to inquiries efficiently.

As the Senior Product Designer and Product Owner, I led the research and development of the Quote Builder tool. Collaborating closely with front-end and back-end developers, my goal was to design a solution within technical constraints that empowered agents to deliver fast, personalized service and accelerate the booking process.

What problems are we solving?

BAB pulls boat data from APIs connected to major charter companies worldwide, but the data is often inconsistent and difficult to manage. While the platform allows browsing, high-end customers, especially those familiar with boating, prefer a concierge-level service. These clients typically contact agents directly, expecting:

• Recommendations tailored to their preferences (location, boat type, capacity, and budget).

• Expert advice with multiple options to choose from.

• The ability to make informed decisions quickly and book their yacht without delay.

Currently, agents faced two inefficient methods for delivering quotes:

1. Manually searching through multiple supplier databases, pulling out the necessary information, and compiling unformatted emails in Outlook. This process took 2-3 days and didn’t create excitement for customers.

2. Using the BAB marketplace itself, which, while better for end-users, wasn’t optimized for agents. It was slow and lacked the specific tools agents needed.

Design Process Process

Our design approach followed a simplified but scalable process due to the niche, internal nature of the product:

1. User Discovery

We conducted in-depth research by shadowing Charter Agents to understand how they currently worked, their pain points, and where improvements could be made. We observed that a significant amount of time was spent manually searching through outdated, slow supplier platforms.

2. Wireframes

Based on the insights from user discovery, we created wireframes with basic styling. We quickly iterated on these by testing prototypes directly with agents. Immediate feedback allowed us to address pain points early and ensure the tool’s usability aligned with their needs.

3. High Fidelity Mockups

Once the backend development was underway, I applied the BAB design system to create high-fidelity mockups. These prototypes helped ensure alignment with development and provided a clear reference during sprints.

4. Testing & Iteration

Throughout our sprints, we adopted a fast, iterative approach—developing, testing, and improving. Real-time feedback uncovered limitations in how the data was being processed, leading us to adjust our methods of presenting and sorting data.

User Journey

Understanding the agents' workflow was crucial in designing a tool that met their needs. The existing process of manually searching multiple provider databases was time-consuming and cumbersome. Our solution streamlined this by allowing the BAB engine to automate the search, freeing up agents to focus on delivering a more personalized service.

With the new tool, agents could:

• Search based on various criteria like boat ID, location, and features.

• Build quotes more efficiently using a shopping cart-style interface.

• Generate and send emails quickly with branded templates, saving time and creating a more polished customer experience.

Internal Dashboard

One of the key proponents to provide Agents with the ability to generate quotes for customers is to have a complete dashboard system that will allow the agents to know their customers, the fleet operators and boats that are available on the platform. From this Dashboard, not only do agents require the ability to access boat, customer and operator data, a one-stop tool to find the right boat, generates quotes, enables discounts and sends an email to the customer was the solution that Borrow A Boat required for it's agents.

This dashboard had to be tailored to their workflow with potential to integrate into their existing CRM systems.

Quote Builder

Building Quotes is an essential part of the Charter Agents new workflow, and thus the Quote Builder was proposed as a dedicated part of the sidebar menu. From here the Agent will need to find a boat based on the parameters of their choosing.

Search by ID

As experts in their field, Charter Agents have a vast wealth of knowledge regarding the inventory and what would best suit their customer. In a lot of use cases, the Agent is aware of a boat previously discovered or chartered previously and have a good standing with the operator. In some of these cases, they remember the ID number assigned to the boat itself and can simply make the search for the desired boat.

Date & Location Search

Holidaymakers have a general timeframe and location in mind as to when they wish to travel. Searching with date ranges allows the Agents to determine which boats are available for booking during the selected time period. A dedicated map feature allows the expert knowledge of the Agents to select a determined area for the customer to select the boats within a designated region.

Features Search

Customers often have requirements specific to their holiday plans. These can include the service type (captain, full crew or bareboat), the boat type, number of cabins, bathrooms, beds amongst other amenities. A singular modal allows the Agent to focus and select multiple filter options to create the right set of filters before the application begins its search. A proposal was put forward to separate the filters as individual items. However, after testing, the application required to make calls to the database with every change to the fields. Thusly, creating a selection of filters before the call is made allowed the agents to not be sat waiting for periods of time which created friction with the product.

Shopping Cart Style Quote Building

The Agents needed a persistent method to collect selected boats for individual quotes. Concepts were designed for modals and persistent sidebars, however by consensus it was decided to select a collapsible sidebar. This allowed for a larger number of boats to be displayed on screen. As the data collected would persist with page loads, this meant Agents could discover more boats through pagination and reduce load times.

Email Compiler

Following the process of collecting boats to be added into a Quote, our next task was to design a standardised and branded email that would get sent out and impress the clients with.

• Customised message from the Agents

• Cards of the boats being sent

• Button links to view the boat on the BAB marketplace

We tested a number of designs that would work in both a single-selection and multi-option design to ensure that our emails being sent were accessible and informative on both desktop and mobile devices.

Customer responded significantly better to an email that was styled and presented clearly. Discussions were had about the potential length of the email becoming a concern, however when testing with some of our userbase, the feedback we received ignored the length of the email completely.

Emails that are tailor designed for an individual have a higher retention rate than a generic plain text email. Our designs allowed us to let the boats be the center of attention and with all the messaging customised by the agent tailored to them, it was clear the direction we had to go with.

We created our templates with a standard HTML pattern and connecting it to our Quote Builder. The emails being sent would be powered by SendGrid, allowing for us bypass any potential spam filters, which was a concern because of previous experience that the Charter Agents were having. 

Testing Designs

Through interactive prototypes, we were able to test a Proof of Concept before pushing it into development. The Charter Agents were asked to complete a selection of tasks and their performance with collecting results and sending them were tracked.

Launching the MVP

As I worked on the design stages, the development team and I collaborated on the means of organising and sorting the data that our tool would be using. We found a number of issues regarding API calls that would limit the potential of the tool. Part of our discovery eventually led to certain decisions being made, including the search functions operate after confirmation and not live, because of this.

Results

To evaluate the tool’s impact, we conducted an experiment. Half of the agents continued using the old manual process, while the other half used the new Quote Builder. The results were striking:

• Manual quotes took 2-3 days to complete.

• Agents using the Quote Builder generated and sent quotes within 30-60 minutes.

After fully transitioning to the new tool, BAB saw a 50% increase in sales during the pandemic in 2020-2021. With fewer travel restrictions, the tool’s potential to further boost sales was clear.

Next steps

Looking ahead, we plan to:

• Store boat data on BAB servers to improve search speed.

• Import customer data from CRM systems to automate and personalize travel recommendations.

• Create agent-specific lists to help agents quickly find and reuse boats that meet their clients’ preferences.