Software for the Caribbean's Charter Capital: A Joburg Founder's Unlikely Industry
In the British Virgin Islands, most of the tourism income comes from yacht chartering, not from hotels or cruise ships. It's an industry Mpho Montsho had never seen up close until a charter business asked him to build its platform.
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Source: UGC
Montsho, who lives in Johannesburg, is co-founder of Techbridge Innovations, a US-based software development house, where he leads product, operations and the delivery teams. He matriculated from Lebone II College of the Royal Bafokeng and studied at Babson College in the United States, then spent two years in investment banking at Deutsche Bank before starting Techbridge.
"I'd never been on a charter yacht when we started," he says. "Most of the first month was me asking the client's team to walk us through a booking, step by step."
A market where price is never fixed
A crewed charter in the BVI typically costs from about USD 15,000 to well over USD 100,000 a week, depending on the yacht and the season. Demand peaks from December to April, when rates can be double those of the summer months. Cruising taxes, levies and fees add further variables.
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That makes pricing one of the hardest parts of the business. Price Christmas week too low and the boat books instantly at a rate it didn't need to accept. Price a quiet week in May too high and it sits empty.
The pricing engine behind it
The platform's pricing engine is the part Montsho talks about most. As product manager, he worked with the client's operations team to define how pricing should work and guided the engineers who built it. Charter companies can set prices by season, week and yacht, adjust them as bookings come in, and try out packages, bundles or longer-stay rates to see how bookings respond.
"The company shouldn't be leaving money on the table on its busiest weeks, or losing bookings on its quiet ones because nobody had time to change the price," Montsho says. "If a package doesn't work, they change it the same day."
Over about 18 months, Montsho managed the product through the build of the full platform, with portals for brokers, customers and yacht owners, plus an operations console for staff. The pricing engine runs underneath all of them, so a rate change reaches everyone at once.
The platform is still in active development, and Montsho is leading new features for brokers this year.
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Source: Briefly News
