Uber comes to the mediterranean — and this time, it wants to put you on a boat

Uber wants to be the app for everything. At its GO-GET event in New York on 29 April, the company announced a suite of expansions befitting that aspiration — hotel bookings through a partnership with Expedia Group, a loyalty tie-up with Accor that allows members of both platforms to earn points across rides and stays, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, boats.

Hailing a wave

From mid-June until October, Uber will offer on-demand vessel bookings across 23 coastal cities in Spain, France, Italy, Croatia and Portugal, including Split, Dubrovnik, Saint-Tropez, Nice, Barcelona and Mallorca.

The partner making it possible is Click & Boat, a Paris-based platform founded in 2013 by entrepreneurs Edouard Gorioux and Jérémy Bismuth, which has since grown into one of the largest boat rental operations in the world, with a fleet of over 55,000 vessels across more than 100 countries.

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The booking experience works as a redirect rather than a fully native integration. A boat icon appears within the Uber app; tapping it takes the user through to Click & Boat's platform to browse available vessels and complete the reservation.

The service is limited to what Click & Boat calls the "Daily with Skipper" category — meaning users select from a curated fleet of around 4,000 boats, all crewed by a professional skipper, with no licence or prior sailing experience required. The range of experiences on offer spans sunset cruises, water sports, aperitifs at sea and day trips to otherwise inaccessible coves.

The price of getting there

Pricing for the Uber-specific service has not yet been officially confirmed, but rates are not expected to diverge meaningfully from those already listed on the Click & Boat platform, where a day's hire in Nice, for instance, currently ranges from around €250 to more than €3,000 depending on vessel size, date and number of passengers.

Uber One members will receive ten per cent back in Uber One Credits on boat bookings made through the app. Reservations can also be made through Uber Reserve or the Uber for Business delegate booking feature — the latter an acknowledgement that a skipper-crewed vessel off the Dalmatian coast can, with a sufficiently creative travel policy, be positioned as a professional expense.

Uber is not new to water. The Thames Clippers partnership, which launched in July 2020, already allows Londoners to book river bus journeys through the app. What the Click & Boat collaboration represents, however, is something rather different in character — less a public transport integration than a leisure proposition, and one aimed squarely at the experiential travel market that has reshaped coastal tourism across the Mediterranean over the past decade. Whether it proves that boating has genuinely become, as Click & Boat rather grandly put it, "part of everyday mobility," remains to be seen. For now, it is enough that someone in Dubrovnik harbour will, from June, be able to book a boat in the time it currently takes to order a car.