Marina Dock Age

Dock Street Marina markets itself and wins Marina of the Year award

by Rob Preston

What happens when a city builds a marina as the focal point of a major revitalization effort but provides no guidelines for how this should be done? The answer is to find an energetic manager with a broad-based vision, one who is proactive in working with other downtown businesses and developing strategic marketing plans that will benefit the marina, the city, and the local businesses and attractions. Once you find this manager, give him some outstanding facilities, an excellent staff, and expect good things to follow. 

If this picture sounds a little far-fetched, Dock Street Marina in Tacoma, Wash., stands as proof that embracing and supporting the local community is good for business. For its leadership role in the revitalization of downtown Tacoma and attracting new visitors to the city and being an environmental and customer service leader, Marina Dock Age has named Dock Street Marina as its 2009 Marina of the Year winner for marinas with fewer than 250 slips.

The beginning

In 2003, the city of Tacoma and the Thea Foss Waterway Development Authority, the governmental body charged with revitalizing Tacoma’s downtown area, wanted to build a new permanent marina to help revitalize the city’s waterfront. Both organizations contributed equally to the $4 million price tag of a new public marina near downtown Tacoma. They envisioned the marina as being the entry portal to bring visiting boaters into the area and offer them access to all the shops, restaurants, and cultural and sporting events in the city.

Two years later, Dock Street Marina came into existence. The five-year-old,
80-wet slip marina is located on the Thea Foss Waterway, which is a 1.5 nautical mile inlet running north and south providing access to Puget Sound via Commencement Bay. The Thea Foss Waterway also forms the shoreline for downtown Tacoma, and the marina is located on the waterway as it enters Commencement Bay.

When the city handed over management of Dock Street Marina and its nearby sister facility, Delin Street Marina, to a management group, it did so to be a positive force in revitalizing the downtown area. The city viewed the marina as an integral part of its revitalization efforts. It would not only house local boaters, but it would also attract transient visitors to the marina and the downtown area.  

Dock Street Marina’s management team set aside 55 slips for local boaters and 25 for transient boaters. As it determined how to proceed, the team realized that it could not act alone. Any efforts to attract boaters to the area would have to include close cooperation with other businesses, museums, and even marinas in the area. “We believed that transient visitors would be the spark for a revitalized downtown,” said Craig Perry, Dock Street’s marina manager. The only question was how to get those boaters to Tacoma, and how to make them stay longer than a day.

In developing strategic marketing plans to bring boaters to the marina, Perry’s first step was to get the marina’s name out there. “When I got here no one knew about the marina or where it was located,” said Perry.

To get boaters to come to the new and improved Thea Foss Waterway, Perry felt that it was important to involve all businesses on the waterway, including other established marinas. “I thought it was more important for us to work together than try to beat up each other,” said Perry.

Perry formed a partnership with Foss Harbor Marina, which was located at the opposite end of the Thea Foss Waterway. Under their partnership agreement, if Dock Street Marina is full and can’t accommodate a boater, then Perry will send the boater to Foss Harbor Marina and visa versa. The two facilities also agreed to share amenities as well. For example, if Foss Harbor’s pumpouts go down, then boaters can go to Dock Street Marina for that service. Since Dock Street doesn’t have a fuel dock, Foss Harbor provides this service and even gives Dock Street’s customers a discount on fuel.

Perry also has an agreement with Totum Marine Services, which is across the waterway from Dock Street. Perry sends customers needing service to Totum Marine, and in exchange, his customers get a discount. It’s a win-win situation for all three marine facilities, and it originally helped promote Dock Street Marina to local boaters.

To attract transient boaters to the area, Perry knew that the marina had to market its spectacular facilities and all the amenities visiting boaters expected. The marina’s floating concrete docks have slip-side pumpouts, potable water, power, phone, WiFi Internet, and cable service. Dock Street Marina also has an administrative building that houses washrooms with showers and laundry facilities. Perry made sure this information appeared in every marina ad that appeared in cruising magazines.

Armed with the basics, Perry now looked to get the marina’s name out to boaters. But at the same time, his gut told him this wasn’t enough. He also had to offer nearby recreational options, such as restaurants, retail shops, and social events that would be attractive to boaters and keep them in the area.

The next marketing steps

To help visitors experience the best of Tacoma, Perry needed the support of local businesses, museums, and the city itself. Although this sounds simple, it took a lot time and effort on Perry’s part to make it happen.

The marina reached an agreement with the Downtown Merchant Group, a local group of businesses working together
to help tourists experience Tacoma for all that it has to offer. Under this agreement, Dock Street can offer its customers additional incentives for staying at the marina. The incentives would be in the form of discount coupons from restaurants and retailers, along with reduced rates at the local glass and maritime museums. He got the city to designate three blocks of downtown as a historic area where six community-oriented events per year would be held.

Armed with these marketing tools, Perry gives each transient boater a cloth welcome bag with the Dock Street logo on the side, and inside are maps of downtown Tacoma and the local area, coupons and gift certificates to local shops and restaurants, boating safety tips, contact information for the Visitor’s Bureau, a gift coffee cup, and more.

To take the hassle out of making reservations or seeing attractions in an unfamiliar town, Dock Street Marina offers a concierge service. The concierge points boaters in the right direction depending on what they are looking for and can even make restaurant reservations and work with local merchants to arrange special events for boaters. One of the most popular events the marina arranges is a tour of the Museum of Glass, which displays work by world-renowned artists and houses the Hot Shop, where artists create work from molten glass right before guests’ eyes.

Dock Street Marina also provides top-notch customer service at its docks. When a boater arrives at the marina, a dock attendant greets him by name and helps the boater with his lines. Employees will pumpout a boat on request, instead of making the customer do it himself. The marina delivers a Sunday newspaper to each boater and even hands out roses on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. To make boaters feel safe at the marina, Dock Street Marina provides gated access to the docks, as well as safety patrols.

To continually improve upon its customer service, the marina mails out self-addressed stamped customer comment cards to both regular tenants and guests asking them to rate the marina’s cleanliness, customer service, special events, communication, and maintenance and repairs on a scale of one to five, with five being the best score. Perry proudly boasts that Dock Street Marina averaged a 4.87 rating this past summer.

Marina events

To get boaters to the marina when it first opened, Perry knew that the marina had to host events for the local community. Thus, Dock Street Marina partnered with the local West Marine store to celebrate National Marina Day/Customer Appreciation Day. On this day, the marina invited all boaters and West Marine customers to visit the marina, hear a live band, eat catered food, and win gifts and prizes provided by the sponsors. 

To take advantage of its waterfront location, Dock Street Marina joined forces with the Tacoma Yacht Club to sponsor the Lighted Christmas Ship Contest in conjunction with the Yacht Club’s lighted boat parade. Once again Perry got retailers to give spectators prizes. This is another example of how partnering helped create a bigger parade and a bigger audience along the waterfront.

In terms of sponsoring events for a cause, Dock Street Marina started an annual event in 2008 called Cast for Kids whereby volunteers take children with developmental disabilities fishing for three hours. Then, the children get trophies, tackle boxes, and lunch at the marina. This event has been a huge success at Dock Street because the volunteers get a free night of moorage at the marina the night before the event, and the children get a lifelong memory thanks to Dock Street Marina.

Finally, in 2005 and 2008, the marina provided moorage for most of the boats that participated in the Tall Ships Tacoma Festival. This is yet another example of how Dock Street’s involvement in local activities that benefit others also exposed the marina to the community.

A Clean Marina

Because major efforts had been made to clean up the area where Dock Street Marina was located, Perry knew that Dock Street Marina’s effort to protect the Thea Foss Waterway couldn’t be half-hearted. He worked hard to get Dock Street certified as a Clean Marina in 2006. In addition, the marina received an environmental certificate from the state to become a Five Star Enviro-Star Marina through 2009.

In 2007, Citizens for a Healthy Bay recognized the marina’s efforts to protect the waterway with the Bay Hero Award. This award honors a business that undertakes extraordinary measures to maintain the clean waters entering nearby Commencement Bay. As part of this effort, Dock Street Marina financially supports Citizens for a Healthy Bay’s clean boater program by distributing bags to its marina customers that contain literature on how boaters can protect the environment, as well as bilge pillows and gas tank pads to keep gas and other toxins from getting into the water. The marina also posts signs throughout the facility to assist boaters in the event of a spill. Additionally, all marina employees are trained to respond to an environmental spill.

In May 2009, Dock Street Marina hosted the first Clean Green Boating Fair to raise awareness about how to keep the waterway clean. To protect the aquatic species on a daily basis, the marina limits boat speed and prevents anchoring in the waterway. Dock Street Marina also provides its boaters with a hazmat disposal area where oil, oily bilge water, batteries, solvents, diesel, oily rags, spill cloths, and antifreeze are collected and recycled through companies that are certified to handle these materials.

As part of its efforts to protect the environment, Dock Street mandates that all its boaters use pumpouts rather than dumping sewage in the waterway. The marina also uses its quarterly newsletter to give boaters tips on how to protect the waterway. For example, Dock Street Marina does not allow its boaters to use soap when washing their boats. It provides recycling bins at each dock for glass, paper, and plastics, and all facilities have motion sensor lights to cut down on energy usage.

Continuous improvements

While Dock Street Marina has many accomplishments, Perry believes that the marina needs continuous improvements to meet the expectations of its customers. In 2009, therefore, Dock Street Marina built a new 320-foot excursion dock called the 16th Street Pier. This pier serves as dedicated moorage for Destiny Harbor Tours, which takes customers on tours of the Thea Foss Waterway.

In response to requests from customers, Dock Street Marina opened a new Human Powered Watercraft Dock in January 2010 for kayakers, who can now store their kayaks at the marina and use the facilities as needed.

In the future, Perry hopes to put a Ticket to Tacoma in the welcome bags as a convenient alternative to carrying all the coupons and gift certificates that boaters currently receive. Boaters could simply use this card for all the discounts at shops and restaurants around town.

Tourism award

Because there was no template to guide Perry and Dock Street Marina in its marketing efforts to make the marina the hub of tourism for downtown Tacoma, Perry has worked tirelessly to demonstrate the tangible benefits that Dock Street Marina provides to the local economy. He estimates that the marina brings at least $500,000 into the local economy every year—quite an accomplishment for an 80-slip marina.

Every year since Dock Street Marina opened, Perry has increased the occupancy rates at the marina and among transient boaters, a clear sign of an industry leader.

Perry meets regularly with the Downtown Merchants Association to show them how business at the downtown restaurants, retailers, and museums has increased since Perry started giving out his welcome packages to transient boaters. The discount coupons are solid proof of this partnership’s benefits.

When the marina opened as an integral part of Tacoma’s economic revitalization project, no one anticipated that Dock Street Marina would be the engine leading Tacoma’s restoration of its downtown waterfront. In fact, the city now looks to the marina as its tourism leader.

For his part in improving Tacoma’s visitor rate, the Tacoma Convention & Visitors Bureau recently named Perry as its 2009 Tourism Professional of the Year. In accepting the award, Perry said that the great things his marina has been doing wouldn’t have been possible without the support and assistance of his marina staff.

Dock Street Marina may be relatively new, but it’s a first-class facility that has catered to permanent and transient boaters alike since it started. It brought in new business to the downtown area and made the local businesses take note of the strong economic impact that a marina can have on the local community. Most importantly, Dock Street Marina is noteworthy for its environmental and customer service efforts. For these reasons and many more, MDA congratulates Dock Street Marina for being one of its 2009 Marinas of the Year.