FloatCheck — quick safety cards for ferries, river boats, and coastal passenger vessels
Before you board a regional ferry or river boat, FloatCheck shows vessel age, capacity, life-saving equipment, inspection history, and recent incidents in a single scannable card.
Independent travelers booking ferries and boat crossings in South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and other regions with mixed-vintage fleets
- Per-vessel safety card with age, capacity, life-jacket count, and last-inspection date
- Route-risk score combining vessel record with recent incidents on the same corridor
- Alerts when a vessel you're due to board has an active incident history
- Offline-cached safety cards for spotty signal at remote ferry terminals
Maritime disasters with aging regional ferries keep recurring; independent travelers increasingly Google-check operators, but no consolidated trustworthy index exists.
Recurring disasters confirm traveler concern (Bali/KMP Tunu Pratama Jaya July 2025, KM Barcelona 5 fire, Vietnam casualties) and DNV reports 80% of 2024 incident growth came from vessels 25+ years old, but no evidence that independent travelers actively pay or pre-check regional short-hop ferries rather than just booking and boarding.Ageing fleet driving increase in incidents - DNV ↗Extreme weather, safety lapses: Bali ferry tragedy spotlights... - CNA ↗
No direct consumer-facing competitor exists; Ferrysafe, Binnacle AI, and Inspectly360 are all B2B fleet/operator compliance tools, while Openferry and Marine Atlantic are booking apps with no safety scoring — the consumer 'scannable safety card' niche is genuinely open.Ferrysafe: Fleet Management for the Modern Maritime Industry ↗
Regional ferry tickets in target markets are low-cost (often <$30), so willingness-to-pay for a per-trip safety lookup is weak; freemium with low conversion is the realistic model and no comparable consumer ferry-safety app has demonstrated sustainable paid uptake.Mobile App | Marine Atlantic ↗
Aging-fleet risk is structurally worsening (DNV data) and climate stressors are amplifying it per the CNA analysis, so the underlying safety-information gap should persist or grow over the next decade in these regions.Ageing fleet driving increase in incidents - DNV ↗Extreme weather, safety lapses: Bali ferry tragedy spotlights... - CNA ↗
The card UI is trivial, but populating it is not — inspection, capacity, and incident data for regional South American, Southeast Asian, and African ferries is fragmented and largely non-digitized (e.g., Thailand's Marine Department publishes annual statistical PDFs rather than per-vessel APIs), making data acquisition the dominant cost.Statistical Data Report Marine Department (Thailand) 2024 ↗Welcome to data.go.th ↗