How electronic contracts and credit cards work in booking marinas on Dockwa

Starting this week, you'll see some tweaks to the process when you book storage or long-term stays at Dockwa partner marinas. It took some engineering work, so we're celebrating the rollout with a bit of an ode to the digitization of marina reservations, along with some answers to common questions. 

First: take a look at the new contract flow, made to get you away from fax machines and onto the water.

Speed

Arguably, the biggest benefit for using electronic contracts and payments is the amount of time it saves in the reservation process. The offline contract process can involve a lot of back and forth between boater and marina. The marina needs to draw up and mail out the contract, manually copying over details from past contracts or seeking out taking new information over the phone. The boater needs to print out the contract, sign-it and then either find a fax machine or mail it back in. – All of which can take days. With the advent of e-sign technology, this process shrinks down to a matter of moments online. Anything that gets you on the water faster is good news to us. 

Security

Dockwa uses Stripe (stripe.com), the leading payment processing platform in the United States today. Stripe has been audited by a PCI-certified auditor, and is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1 – the most stringent level of certification available.

How this protects your payment information online:

• All of your credit card numbers are encrypted.

• Decryption keys are stored on separate machines. Stripe’s infrastructure for storing, decrypting, and transmitting card numbers runs in a separate hosting environment, and doesn’t share any credentials with Stripe’s primary services (API, website, etc.).

• Stripe regularly audits the details of their implementation, including the certificates we serve, the certificate authorities we use, and the ciphers we support.

• They use HSTS to ensure that browsers interact with Stripe only over HTTPS – a secure connection.

Each of these steps add an additional level of security to card transactions to prevent them from being inappropriately accessed.  

Simplicity

By using a credit card with Dockwa, you're not only able to get through your contract process faster, you can have that card securely on record for future purchases like gas and supplies. What's more, if you decide to head up or down the coast to another Dockwa marina, you can book with them without having to re-enter all of your information. Boating should be relaxing. It should be an escape from all the tiny inconveniences that pepper our day-to-day lives. Using online booking tools and secure transactions can remove a lot of the friction in your journey and keep things simple. 

We hope you enjoy the new contract process.  If you have any questions about how we handle payments or the new process, you can check out our support docs here or contact us at mayday@dockwa.com.