MarinaNow
A slip-booking marketplace that let boaters search, compare, and reserve marinas worldwide in minutes.
Project Snapshot
- Client
- MarinaNow
- Industry
- Marine & Boating Travel Marketplace
- Platform
- iOS & Android
- Timeline
- 6 months
- Our Role
- Full-stack mobile app development + UI/UX design
The Challenge
Before partnering with iMobdev, MarinaNow's founders were running slip reservations the way marinas had for decades: phone calls, faxed availability sheets, and emailed confirmations that could take days to come back. Boaters cruising into a new region had no reliable way to see which marinas near them actually had space for their vessel, and marina operators had no digital front door to list availability to a broader, mobile audience.
The pain points were concrete. There was no unified search letting a boater find marinas by location and see them plotted on a map in real time. There was no way to filter by boat dimensions — length, width, and draft — before committing to a booking, which meant mismatched reservations and wasted calls. And the entire reservation-to-payment journey, from checking a date to confirming a slip, lived across disconnected paper and email threads instead of a single trusted flow.
Every season without a real booking product cost MarinaNow credibility with the marina operators it needed as supply partners — none of them would commit inventory to a platform that couldn't yet prove it could take a booking end to end. Meanwhile, boaters were defecting to word-of-mouth and generic map apps that had no idea what a "boat draft" even was.
Technically, the team also needed the product to work reliably on the spotty cellular connections common in coastal and marina environments, without a large in-house engineering team to build it.
Our Solution
iMobdev's strategy was to rebuild slip booking around the two things a boater actually needs at the moment of search: "where is there space" and "will my boat fit." Every subsequent decision — the map-first search, the boat-specific booking form, the cart-based checkout — was built to answer those two questions as fast as possible.
On the architecture side, we built a native iOS and Android app on top of a shared REST API, with marina listings, availability, and pricing served from a central booking engine backed by a relational database. Map search was built on native map SDKs so location pins, current-location detection, and marina callouts render instantly even on weaker connections, with search results cached locally so a boater can keep browsing without losing their place.
On the UX side, we designed a persistent bottom tab bar (Search, Account, Favorites, Cart, Settings) so the core actions were always one tap away, and gave every marina its own profile with dedicated Overview, Book, Photos, Map, and Reviews tabs — so a boater could see real marina photography and reviews before ever entering a date.
For the booking flow itself, we built a boat-aware reservation form capturing length, width, and draft alongside check-in and check-out dates, feeding directly into a cart and checkout step that showed total price and marina details before payment. Marina operator data — logos, addresses, photos, and rates — synced through a partner content pipeline so listings stayed accurate without manual re-entry.
Delivery was phased: core search-and-map plus marina profiles shipped first, the boat-specific booking form and cart/checkout followed, and a final phase focused on favorites, account/reservation history, and cross-device QA ahead of launch.
The Impact
MarinaNow launched with a complete slip-booking journey where none existed before: search a region on a map, open a marina's full profile with photos and reviews, submit boat-specific dimensions, and check out — all from a phone. The boat-aware booking form eliminated the back-and-forth phone calls that used to precede every reservation, and the persistent Favorites and Reservations views gave returning boaters a reason to keep the app open season after season.
With a live, working product to demonstrate, MarinaNow's team could finally bring marina operators a real booking channel instead of a pitch. iMobdev continues to support MarinaNow as it expands into new coastal regions and onboards additional marina partners.
Key Features
What We Built
Map-First Marina Search
Search any region and see marinas plotted live on a map with current-location detection.
Full Marina Profiles
Overview, Photos, Map, and Reviews tabs give boaters everything needed to decide before booking.
Boat-Aware Booking Form
Reservation forms capture boat length, width, and draft so slips are matched correctly.
Cart-Based Checkout
Add a reservation to cart, review total price and marina details, then pay in one flow.
Favorites & Reservation History
Boaters can star marinas to revisit and track upcoming and past reservations from one screen.
Distance-Ranked Results
List view ranks nearby marinas by exact distance for fast comparison.
Tech Stack
- Swift
- Kotlin
- REREST APIs
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- GOGoogle Maps SDK
- AWSAWS
Screenshots
App in Action
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“iMobdev took a booking process that lived on the phone and in email and turned it into an app boaters actually trust. The map search and boat-specific booking form were exactly what our marina partners needed to say yes.”
Founder
MarinaNow
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