A real small-harbour digitalisation pilot, ready for an Atlantic Area consortium.

The problem

Small guest harbours mostly still run on phone calls, VHF, a whiteboard and a card machine. A visiting boat has no reliable way to see what is free, request a berth, check in on arrival, or pay online — and the harbour master ends up with no digital record of any of it.

The proposed pilot flow

1. 1
   Harbour discovery

   A visiting boat finds the harbour, its berths and its services online, instead of guessing from a paper pilot guide.

2. 2
   Berth request / booking

   A request or an online booking replaces the phone call and the VHF hail.

3. 3
   Arrival / check-in

   The harbour master confirms arrival against the booking record, not a page in a logbook.

4. 4
   Payment / operator workflow

   Payment and the harbour's own record-keeping happen in the same flow, where the harbour has switched it on.

What Mervare already brings today

• Public harbour discovery, live today across the ~245 harbours of the Estonian national register, each showing only the actions it actually supports — never a booking button a harbour cannot honour.
• A berth request and booking flow with harbour-master confirmation (pending → confirmed).
• A check-in / check-out lifecycle recorded against each booking.
• Card payment via Stripe Connect, with the harbour itself as merchant of record, where a harbour has turned it on.
• An operator dashboard — booking calendar and berth map — the harbour master actually uses, not a mock-up.

This runs today for a small number of Baltic harbours — most of the register is discovery-only. A pilot would extend the same, already-working flow to a new Atlantic-area harbour, not invent it from scratch.

Measurable validation outputs

• Operator time saved per booking, against phone/paper handling
• Share of berth requests or bookings completed digitally
• Discovery-to-request conversion rate
• Payment completion rate, where online payment is enabled
• Structured feedback from the harbour operator and from visiting boaters

Why transfer, not speculative R&D

The discovery → request → check-in → payment flow above is not a concept — it already runs in production on the Baltic Sea. A Call 4 pilot would be about transferring and adapting an existing system to a new Atlantic-area harbour and measuring what changes there, which is a smaller, cheaper and faster proposition than commissioning new technology.

What a host partner would need to provide

• An eligible Atlantic Area pilot context within the call's own rules
• Access to, and cooperation from, one or a small handful of harbours and their operators
• A place in the consortium's work plan and reporting, alongside the partner's own project governance

The pilot can start small

This does not need a whole coastline. One harbour, or a small handful, is enough to test discovery, requests, check-in and payment end to end. It needs no new hardware commitments beyond what a single harbour already needs, and it can be scaled back or withdrawn without disrupting the harbour's normal operations.