incrediblue is an online platform that makes yachting holidays accessible to all. SME spoke to Antonios Fiorakis, CEO and co-founder incrediblue to find out more…
Tell me about your company – where did the idea come from? How did you get started?
incrediblue is an online platform that makes yachting holidays accessible to all; travellers can search and book Mediterranean yacht vacations instantly from a fleet of over 200 captains and 3000 sailboats.
The idea came about in 2011, when some friends from abroad organised a yacht holiday in Greece and invited me to join. I was really excited to go on a fantastic sailing holiday on the Mediterranean, but it ended up as a terrible experience; the yacht was entirely different from the one we had paid for, the captain was inexperienced, the yacht arrived late, it was dirty and the space was smaller than required so two people had to sleep on a sofa outside. In the end we had fun, but I couldn’t help but think that there had to be a better way.
After doing some research, and researching the space with a pool of yacht owners, we spotted several ways we could offer a better service. The yacht rental market was operating mainly offline, there was no curation of options and there were trust concerns around the safety of the vessels and making payments to unknown sources. Armed with this knowledge, we started working on our business model and founded incrediblue in 2012.
How would you describe your business’ ideology?
People say that for a start up to win, it needs to do something at least 10x better than its traditional alternative and it’s our goal to make people’s holidays 10x better than any traditional holiday rental. For us, it’s all about delivering an exceptional customer experience and a high-end ‘concierge’ service. Yacht holidays are a luxury experience and we want to ensure that every part of the process of using incrediblue is as enjoyable and easy as possible for users – simple booking, payment and
Could you tell me a bit about your product/services range?
incrediblue is often described as the ‘Uber for yachts’, as we have simplified the processes of finding, arranging the logistics, booking and paying for a sailing holiday. We focus on making everything as simple as possible and our work with Braintree on making payments secure and easy has been critical to that.
Our service is currently available in a number of Mediterranean countries, including Greece, Croatia, Spain and Turkey. In our 3000-strong fleet we have a variety of boats to cater for different needs and budgets, ranging from sailing yachts to motor sailers, and offer over 100 different tours to ensure that we have something to suit every group.
