Operator Agreement

You are the boat business. You own or control the vessel, you hold the licences and the insurance, you supply the captain and crew where one is carried, and you decide who sails and whether conditions are safe. We are the place renters find you, the software you run the booking through, and nothing else. Every charter is a contract between you and your renter. We are not a party to it, we are not the carrier, and we do not employ your crew.

The rest of this document is that sentence, made specific enough to rely on.

You are solely responsible for insuring your vessel, your business and everyone aboard. We do not provide, arrange, procure, broker, recommend, verify, review, inspect, approve or confirm any insurance of any kind, and we never will under this agreement. We are not an insurer and we are not an insurance intermediary. Nothing on this site is an offer of cover, a certificate, an endorsement, or a representation that any cover exists.

You warrant that for every boat you list you hold, and will keep in force for as long as the listing is published and for the duration of every trip booked through it, whatever insurance the law and ordinary commercial practice require where the boat operates. For a vessel carrying passengers for hire in the United States that ordinarily means commercial marine liability cover written for charter use, in an amount appropriate to the vessel and its passenger capacity. A recreational or pleasure-use policy generally excludes carrying passengers for hire, and using one for chartered trips is likely to leave you uninsured at the moment it matters.

We do not check any of this. We ask for no certificate, we read no policy, we hold no evidence of cover, and we operate no verification, vetting or approval process for insurance. We have no system that would tell us whether your policy exists, what it covers, whether it is in force, or whether it lapsed this morning. Nothing about your listing being published, your account being active, or a booking being accepted is any indication that we believe you are insured. If you want somebody to confirm you are properly covered, that person is your broker, not us.

Because we do not check it, we do not stand behind it. You will not describe BoatRental.com to a renter, a guest, an authority or an insurer as having verified, required, approved or arranged your cover, and you will correct anyone who assumes we did. You are responsible to your renters and their guests for any loss arising from cover you did not hold, and that responsibility is yours whether or not we ever asked about it.

The same applies to everything adjacent to insurance: seaworthiness, surveys, safety equipment, maintenance, crew competence and credentials, drug and alcohol testing where it is required of you, and any damage deposit you choose to take. We inspect none of it. Where your listing states a certification, a licence, a survey or a safety standard, that is your statement about your own business, published by us at your request, and it remains yours.

You warrant that you hold every registration, licence, permit and certificate your market requires of the vessel, of your business and of whoever operates the boat, and that each is current. In the United States a vessel carrying more than six passengers for hire must be inspected and carry appropriately credentialed crew, and an uninspected vessel may not carry more than twelve passengers regardless of its size. Exceeding a lawful passenger limit is your liability and never ours.

If a licence, permit or certificate lapses, is suspended or is refused, you will stop accepting bookings for the affected boat and tell us promptly. We would rather lose the listing than carry a trip nobody may lawfully run.

When a renter pays by card through this site, the payment is created on yourStripe account. You are the merchant of record. The funds settle in your balance and never in ours, your business name is what appears on the renter’s card statement, and a chargeback is debited from your balance. We take our fee as a platform fee on that payment; we do not receive, hold, escrow or route the rest of the money at any point.

You are also the carrier. Where a trip is crewed, the captain and crew are yours — your employees or your contractors, engaged by you, paid by you, directed by you. We do not supply, select, recommend, schedule, train, credential or supervise any captain or crew member, and we run no captain marketplace. Where a trip is bareboat, the renter operates the vessel and any captain they engage is engaged by them directly, not through us.

Our fee is 12% of the trip price, deducted from your side at the moment the renter pays. It is flat and published: it does not vary by insurance package, listing type, season, volume or how long you have been here, and there is no exclusivity — list the same boat anywhere else you like. Renters pay no platform fee at all, so the price on your listing is the price they are charged.

Stripe’s own payment processing is charged to you by Stripe, from your Stripe balance, exactly as it would be if the renter had booked on your own website. That is a consequence of your being the merchant of record, it is Stripe’s charge rather than ours, and it is separate from and additional to our 12%. We do not mark it up and we receive no part of it.

The fee that applies to a booking is the fee published when the request was made, and it is frozen onto that booking. A later change to our rate never re-prices a trip already agreed.

You appoint us as your agent for the limited purpose of instructing refunds on your connected Stripe account, in exactly three circumstances and no others:

One. A payment arrives for a booking that was already cancelled or had expired — money with nothing to attach to. We refund it in full, automatically, as soon as we learn of it.

Two. A renter cancels, and the cancellation tier published on the listing and frozen onto that booking returns something. We refund that amount.

Three. You cancel a trip before it was due to depart. We refund the renter in full, whatever the tier says, because the tier governs a renter changing their mind and not an operator withdrawing the boat.

There is no fourth. We will not refund on our own initiative outside these three, and a refund we instruct is always funded from your Stripe balance — never from ours, never by a transfer or payout from us to anyone. Our platform fee is returned in the same proportion, so neither of us keeps a fee on money that went back. After a trip has started, nothing is refunded automatically and any refund is a decision taken by a person with the facts in front of them.

You may of course refund a renter yourself from your own Stripe dashboard at any time, for any reason. If you refund a booking in full we treat the trip as cancelled by you and say so to the renter.

A renter’s right to dispute a card payment with their bank cannot be waived by anyone, and this agreement does not pretend otherwise. We will not ask you to accept a clause saying renters may not charge back, because such a clause is void and including it would put the rest of this document at risk.

What we can agree is who answers one. Because the charge is on your account, a dispute is debited from your balance and it is yours to contest. You will keep, for at least 540 days after each trip, the records that answer a dispute: the booking, the messages, the terms the renter agreed, proof the trip was provided or why it was not, and anything else you would want in front of a card network. Card networks allow a cardholder to dispute a service a long time after it was paid for — a booking made in January for a July sailing can be disputed well into the following year — so the retention period is deliberately longer than feels necessary.

Where a dispute, refund, fine or claim leaves us out of pocket on your behalf, or where we have paid a fee that was yours, you will reimburse us, and we may set that amount off against fees we owe you or against future payments through the platform. This survives your leaving the platform.

Under the arrangement described above it does not: payments are created on your account and settle in your balance. This clause exists for the narrow case where that is not true of a particular payment — a market or a method where the mechanics differ, or a correction after the fact. In that case, and only in that case, you appoint us as your limited agent to collect that payment on your behalf, and the renter’s payment to us discharges their obligation to you to the same extent as if they had paid you directly, whether or not we in fact remit it to you. We then owe you that money as your agent. We are not a bank, we pay no interest, and we do not hold customer funds as a deposit-taker.

You may only list a boat you own or are authorised to charter, and every listing must be accurate: the vessel, its capacity, its condition, its home port, its price, and what the price does and does not include. Fuel, provisioning, dockage, crew beyond the captain and gratuity are yours to charge and yours to disclose, and a cost a renter discovers on the dock is a complaint we will side with them on.

You keep ownership of your photographs and descriptions. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to display, reproduce and adapt them for the purpose of showing your listing on the site and in the places the site is indexed, cited and summarised, for as long as your listing is published and for a reasonable period afterwards in caches and archives we do not control. You warrant that you hold the rights to everything you upload — including the photographer’s rights in photographs you did not take yourself.

You approve every booking yourself. There is no automatic booking on this platform and there will not be one: whether a particular party, on a particular date, in particular conditions, can safely be taken out is a judgement only you can make.

You are responsible for determining, collecting and remitting every tax arising from your charters, including any sales, use, tourist, charter or value-added tax your market imposes, and for your own income and employment taxes. We do not calculate, collect or remit tax on your behalf, and our fee is exclusive of any tax you may owe on it. Where a law makes us responsible for a tax on transactions through the platform we will tell you before it takes effect and say what changes.

Either of us may end this agreement at any time, for any reason, by closing the account or telling the other. Ending it does not cancel bookings already accepted: you must honour every confirmed trip or cancel it properly and refund the renter.

We may suspend or remove a listing, or suspend your account, without notice where we reasonably believe it is unlawful, unsafe, materially inaccurate, or that a licence or permit you warranted is not in force — and with notice otherwise. We are not obliged to police any of these things and do not undertake to; acting on something we happen to learn is not a promise to look for it, and never makes us responsible for what we did not find.

The sections on insurance, chargebacks and set-off, your indemnity, and anything that by its nature should outlast the account, survive termination.

You will defend, indemnify and hold us harmless against any claim, loss, liability, fine or reasonable cost arising out of your boats, your trips, your crew, your listings, your tax position, your failure to hold or maintain insurance, licences or permits, or your breach of this agreement — including a claim brought by a renter, a guest, a passenger’s family, a crew member, an insurer or an authority.

This does not extend to loss caused by our own fraud or gross negligence, or to anything a law that applies to you does not permit to be indemnified.

Our liability to you is limited as set out in the Terms of Service. That cap is stated once, there, and applies to everything between us; this agreement does not add a second one. In summary, and without replacing what that document says: we are not liable for your lost bookings, lost profit, or the consequences of a trip we were not party to, and our total liability is capped at the greater of the platform fees flowing through your account in the twelve months before the claim or $1,000, with the carve-outs that document sets out.

We will give you at least 15 days’ notice, by email or another durable medium, before any change to this agreement takes effect, and we will say what changed. If you do not accept a change you may end this agreement before it takes effect; continuing to list after it takes effect is acceptance. A shorter period applies only where a law obliges us to change something sooner, and we will say so.

Every version carries a number and an effective date at the top of this page. This is version 1.

This agreement is governed by the law of the State of Florida, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts sitting in Palm Beach County, Florida have jurisdiction over any dispute between us. Nothing here removes a right you have under a mandatory law of the place you operate that cannot be contracted out of.

Questions about this agreement go to info@boatrental.com. Boat Rental INTL LLC is a Florida limited liability company.