Smart Charter Ibiza’s Largest Boat Charter Company
Young and ambitious, Smart Charter Ibiza is the largest boat-charter company in Ibiza. Beginning life as just a small charter business with a single boat, the business started 2018 with a grand total of forty within the company and have now been acquired by a global leader in luxury boat rental – Boatsetter.
Co-founded in 2013 by islanders Charlie Veale and Alessandra Grisoni, Smart Charter Ibiza’s growth is simply unparalleled. Both business partners and friends, Charlie and Alessandra’s story of success is one fuelled by the immense energy they instilled throughout the company from the bottom up.
“We started off as a boat charter company with one boat and now have a fleet of 40,” says Charlie;“then there is the sales side of the business where we buy, sell and rent, as well as acting as a broker.”
An avid lover of boats from a young age and a former boat-captain himself, Charlie looked for a way to build on his passion and knowledge of the industry in its beginning; “I have always loved boats and after working as a captain, I thought, ‘this is great fun’ and began to look at ways I could build on it. In our second year we bought another boat and were introduced to our investor who brought with him two more.This meant great financial support, which has allowed us to expand rapidly over a very short space of time.”
Dynamic, ambitious and innovative, yet still remaining both fun and professional, Smart Charter Ibiza’s focus on customer experience is what set it aside from many other charter services on Ibiza. A personalised and stress free experience propelled by the fact that the company owned all of its boats, which offers maximum flexibility, reliability and peace of mind for clients.
“We moved from offering boats of around seven metres long to twenty-five metres, offering a wide range of boats for people of all budgets” says co-founder Alessandra. “We’d get rentals from local islanders from March and this is a great source of repeat business. It’s always nice to see the familiar faces each year.”
Smart Charter Ibiza’s rapid rise to the top is testament to the fact that with quality comes reward.
Now in 2018, Boatsetter, the world’s number 1 Boat-Rental Community, has acquired Smart Charter Ibiza. This acquisition is the first international acquisition of Boatsetter and reinforces Boatsetter’s positioning in international markets by providing them with the Smart Charter team’s first-rate talent, including: sales, business development and yacht management; a hand-picked group of boating and sailing experts who are also Ibiza and Mallorca residents, offering Boatsetter customers local insight into the island.
Boatsetter now offers the highest quality day charters with exclusive partnerships with the top hotels and concierges in the Balearic islands, such as Nobu Ibiza Bay, Hard Rock Ibiza and the Pacha Hotel.
“Our vision of making boating accessible to everyone, everywhere is being executed with this acquisition. Boatsetter, the #1 boat rental community, brings a world-class experience now to our customers in the Mediterranean, and this will begin our expansion in this region”, said Pablo Vidal, Managing Director of Boatsetter Europe.
“Boatsetter gives us the chance to scale our business, use world-class technology and use our experience to accelerate growth and expansion in the Med”, mentioned Charlie Vale, now former managing director of Smart Charters and appointed as Head of Sales at Boatsetter.