One of the things I'm looking for is to have partners schedule the boat and for a list of crew/friends be presented as potential invitees during the scheduling process and potentially having groups added to the invite. a rule of 1st to post should be applied where this 1st invitee who responds is granted passage and once maximum occupancy is arrived at an email goes out to notify all invitees that the opportunity has closed.

The user interface allows adding a member but I'm not clear how I can make the partner/crew once I add a member. Also its not clear if this is a member of my boat/crew that I'm adding or if it is a member for the web site. I really don't want to be adding my friends emails into a larger arena and open them up to solicitation.

Also is there a limit to the number of members that can be added?

Hi Mark - thanks for the submission. I'll answer your questions in reverse order - easiest to hardest.

There is no limit to the number of members you can attach to your boat. Basically, a member for us is a person who is given the right to reserve your boat for a certain percentage of the month. A member set up with a 10% share would be able to directly reserve your boat 10% of the time on a monthly basis. When you add a member to your boat you are also adding them as a Nautical Monkey user, but we don't send them advertising emails or sell our emails to anyone. They would only get emails associated with them using the site, notification of reservations, confirmation of reservation requests, etc. The user also has the option to limit notification emails in their account area.

As far as adding crew members to a reservation that is an interesting idea. Those people wouldn't be "members" of your boat under our paradigm because, presumably, you wouldn't want them scheduling the boat directly - looks like you would just want them to be notified of an upcoming trip and be able to opt in as a crew member. If I got that wrong let me know. Let me give that some thought and see how we might be able to implement the concept - we have been thinking of doing some infrastructure for crewing for some time and this might be the opportunity to work through it. I'll let you know once we've had a chance to work through it and feel free to contact me with any other questions or additional information.

Hi John,
Thanks for the response. Crewing the boat seems to be the biggest challenge I hear from fellow boat owners and especially from the racing captains. Something supporting this would be a great feature.

-Mark