With tongue firmly in cheek, international yachting journalist and boat tester alan harper weighs up the value of the average boatbuilder freebie.

Boat shows are a time of plenty for hotel cleaning staff. The ladies who did my room in the Genoa Sheraton last October were, the morning I checked out, better off to the tune of one designer belt, a large quantity of body lotion (I’m not making this up) and a bottle of Marsala wrapped in silver paper and tied with a ribbon bearing the name of a well-known boatbuilder. In other years, at other shows around the world, bemused cleaners have found themselves the proud possessors of jackets, ties, jumpers, bags, pieces of crystal, drinks, cuddly toys and an orange.

Everyone likes a free gift, but there is a limit to how much even the most acquisitive journalist can carry away from a show, bearing in mind that their bags are bound to bursting under the strain of a couple of hundred kilos of brochures. However, there are always things which are far too good to leave behind.

The coolest and most practical gizmos given out at the recent spate of autumn shows was the USB ‘memory stick’. The best of the lot was courtesy of an Italian motoryacht constructor. It’s one unscrewed from the top of a very presentable pen, and when you plugged it into a laptop it gave access to all the necessary press information — words, graphics, photographs, the lot. And it’s re-useable once the stuff you need has been copied across to your own computer. It certainly made the CDs and DVDs from rivals look slightly ‘old hat’.

Umbrellas at inclement Genoas and Düsseldorfs are usually well worthwhile too. The good ones have even made it worthwhile trying to check them in at the airport!

Another Italian boatbuilder came up with a neat little novelty at Cannes 2005 — a miniature telescope, although as one half of a pair of miniature binoculars it’s probably called a monocular. It’s not an especially high-quality piece of optical equipment, but in its role as a pleasant surprise in the press pack it performed very well — and had the added attraction of being small and lightweight.

There have always been jackets, of course. Every yachting journalist’s wardrobe is bulging with them. They have to be worn with circumspection. It wouldn’t do to turn up to a press conference emblazoned with a rival company’s logo. In fact for this reason mine hardly get worn anywhere near the coast and never at boat shows.

Years ago when I was a ‘deputy junior under sub’ on Motor Boat & Yachting, we had some fairly hopeless jackets of our own made up, all blue and red and rather garish, with the MBY logo stitched on the front. I have to confess I never wore mine voluntarily, and eventually it found its way into a charity shop. In marketing terms this was clearly a risky strategy, and sure enough, not long afterwards I saw it again, on the back of a weather-beaten old gentleman brandishing a can of Carlsberg Special Brew. It wasn’t quite the brand image the publishing management was striving for, but we may well have doubled our copy sales in my slightly scabrous area of South London. At around the same time I was given a jacket at the launch of a transatlantic record contender. It was bright green and about four sizes too big, but excellent quality, so I kept it — and funnily enough it fits fine now!

Every now and then the same idea seems to grip the marketing departments of the entire industry at the same time. Jackets were one example, but not long ago it was ‘Year of the Wheelie Bag’. Obviously that was a great year and an excellent pressie for journalists usually huffing and puffing between airports with boat show material. You simply can’t have enough luggage with wheels — or so I thought. But then I got given three all at once. The first was practical yet compact, full of ingenious stowage solutions, nippy in turns yet strangely unstable at high speed if it was at all bumpy — in fact, not unlike the products of the boatbuilder that gave them out. I still use mine all the time.

Appropriately enough, the next one — from a builder of big, voluminous motoryachts, which seem happiest chugging along in straight lines — was big and square. And although rock-steady on the straights, it was hopeless at cornering.
My third wheelie bag was from a builder of very fast, flashy powerboats, and was bright red and impossible to miss on the baggage carousel. It had sporty handling, a sexily curved extending handle, and was covered in zips, tabs, clips and logos. Sadly, I had to get rid of mine as it was starting to come apart at the seams. Was this a reflection of the boatbuilder’s workmanship? I like to think not.

One thing I knew I couldn’t leave for the cleaners at the Genoa Sheraton last autumn was the football, however. It has easily been the most popular freebie I’ve ever brought home. It was a real one — size five, with a valve for blowing it up — and as it was courtesy of one of the Mediterranean’s more design-conscious boatbuilders it was very flash, all shiny blue with silver arrows and ‘High Performance Sphere’ emblazoned on it — you can probably guess the source of that one. Yet I have absolutely no idea how it reflects the values of the particular boatbuilder’s brand, but for my kids it’s easily the coolest football on the local playing fields. Now that makes a lot more sense to me than body lotion!

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