Ahoy

Boat and Dock Rental Marketplace

Renting a car or a bicycle on holiday is straightforward. Boats are not, and neither is finding somewhere to dock one you already own.

Platform:

Web, iOS, Android

Industry:

Travel

Team size:

8 people

Country:

USA

Project Duration:

7 months

The year started & completed:

2019

Ahoy is a peer-to-peer marketplace where boat and dock owners rent out what they own, and travellers find it in one place.

Scope and Objectives

The goal was a single service that matches boat and dock owners with people who want to rent, across web, iOS and Android.

Two-sided marketplace

A user picks a role on joining: boat owner, dock owner, or someone looking to rent either. The same account structure serves both sides of the transaction.

Listings and discovery

Owners publish an advert and wait to be found. Renters browse lists of boats and docks and approach the owner directly.

Online payments

Rent is paid inside the product through PayPal or Stripe, so the renter never leaves the service to settle up.

Social feed

A feed sits alongside the marketplace, giving owners and renters a place to post and follow activity rather than only transact.

Three clients, one service

Web, iOS and Android versions were all in scope, each built with the tooling native to its platform.

Focus Areas and Deliverables

Back end

The service runs on PHP with Laravel, handling accounts, roles, listings, bookings and the payment integrations with PayPal and Stripe.

PHPLaravel

Web front end

The web interface is built with Vue.js, giving the browsing and listing flows the responsiveness of an application rather than a page-by-page site.

Vue.jsJavaScript

iOS app

The iOS client is native, written in Objective-C and built in Xcode.

Objective-CXcode

Android app

The Android client is written in Java.

Java

Environment and tooling

Docker standardised the development environment, with PhpStorm and WebStorm used for the back-end and front-end work.

DockerPhpStormWebStorm

Challenges Identified

Three platforms, two developers

Web, iOS and Android versions of the same service meant four codebases and a broad spread of languages and tools — PHP and Vue.js on the web, Objective-C on iOS, Java on Android. Keeping behaviour consistent across them, with a team of two, drove most of the technical decisions.

Performance against user experience

The back end is PHP; the interface is Vue.js and built to feel immediate. Making the two meet, so that a rich front end does not come at the cost of response times, was the balance the team had to hold throughout.

Results of the Project

A complete rental loop, serving both sides of the marketplace.

Ahoy works as a complete rental loop: a user signs up as a boat owner, a dock owner, or someone who wants to rent either, and the product serves both sides from there.

Owners list what they have and wait to be approached. Renters browse the available boats and docks and start the conversation themselves. When a rental is agreed, payment is taken in the product through PayPal or Stripe.

The social feed runs alongside all of it, so the service is somewhere people stay between rentals rather than a listing site they visit once a season.