Fair Fuel: Cost-Sharing Models for Shared Motorboats Compared

Fuel is the argument every shared-motorboat club has eventually. Not the moorings, not the scratched gelcoat, not the booking rules. Fuel. A membership fee is the same for everyone; fuel burn is not. One member potters round the harbour for an hour on a Sunday morning. Another runs to the Needles and back every week with the throttle well forward. If the club has no fair way of splitting the bill between those two, resentment builds quietly until somebody says it out loud at the AGM.

The four models

Clubs handle fuel in one of four ways. In the fee: fuel is bundled into the subscription and nobody thinks about it again. The honesty box: use the boat, drop what feels fair into the tin at the clubhouse. Refill on return: bring the boat back with full tanks, like a hire car. Metered per trip: record the litres and the cost at the end of each session, and bill each member for exactly what they used.

Each model has its partisans. Only one survives contact with a growing membership.

Flat fees are a tax on the careful

Bundling fuel into the fee is the easiest to run, which is why so many clubs start there. It is also the least fair, and the unfairness runs in precisely the direction that damages a club. The harbour-potterer and the passage-maker pay the same, so the light user subsidises the heavy one. And light users tend to be the members a club most wants to keep: they book sensibly, put few hours on the engines and rarely break anything. Sooner or later one of them does the arithmetic, realises they are paying for someone else's diesel, and quietly fails to renew.

There is a second problem: the committee has to guess. Setting the fee means predicting how much the fleet will burn and what fuel will cost a year in advance. Guess low and the club eats the difference. Guess high and you have overcharged forty members to protect yourself from your three heaviest users.

The honesty box deserves a brief word, because in most clubs' experience it is neither. A folded fiver and a scribbled note cover a trip that used thirty pounds of petrol, nothing can be proven, and the members who do pay properly end up covering the shortfall. It is the flat fee with extra admin and worse feelings attached.

Refill on return: fine in theory

Bring it back full sounds watertight, and it works for hire cars because there is a filling station on every corner, open at all hours. Fuel berths are not like that. Most keep office hours, some close for the winter weekend, and on a fine Saturday in July there is a queue of tenders and RIBs idling off the pontoon. A member finishing an afternoon slot at half past six finds the berth shut since five, and now the rule has an exception. The next member starts the day with half tanks and a grievance, the exception needs a process, and within a season the exceptions are the system.

There is also the gauge problem. On plenty of boats the fuel gauge reads in optimistic quarters, so "basically full" becomes a judgement call made by the person with the least incentive to be strict about it.

Meter it, bill it monthly

The model that scales is the least romantic one. At the end of each session, record the litres taken and what they cost. At the end of each month, bill every member for their own usage. Short trips cost little, long trips cost more, and nobody has yet mounted a serious argument against that principle.

The mechanics matter less than the habit. Some clubs run a bowser with a log sheet, some hold an account at the fuel berth, some ask the member to fill up and photograph the receipt. What counts is that litres and cost are written down against a named booking on the day, not reconstructed from memory at month end.

Then there is the statement effect. When the bill arrives itemised, showing the date, the boat, the litres and the cost of every session, the arguing stops. Not because members become more agreeable, but because there is nothing left to argue about. A vague quarterly demand invites dispute; a line-by-line statement is its own evidence. This is where fleet software earns its keep — Nauticore, for one, logs litres and cost against each booking, filters out sessions not yet billed, and emails an itemised statement in one click, with a month-by-month statement tab in the app so members can check the record themselves.

Setting the rate

Two defensible choices. The first is pump price: members pay exactly what the fuel cost, the club takes nothing, and nobody can grumble. The second is pump-plus: a small per-litre margin, say ten pence, ring-fenced for an engine fund. The logic is sound. Engine wear tracks fuel burn closely, so the members buying the most litres are also putting the most hours on the engines, and a per-litre levy makes them the largest contributors to the overhaul their hours will eventually cause.

Whichever you choose, print it on the statement. "Fuel at cost" or "fuel at cost plus 10p per litre for the engine fund" both read as prudence. A mysterious club rate that sits above the pump price and is never explained reads as something else entirely. The whole point of metering is that the numbers are visible. Keep them that way, and fuel stops being the argument and becomes what it should have been all along: a line on a bill.