Boats, boating tourism, bureaucracy. What needs to change in 2025. Aim 1

There is a treasure, we will never tire of repeating, that is worth billions and that our country has yet to figure out how to make the most of. It is nautical tourism, in all its forms.

Nautical tourism, what needs to change in 2025

In 2024, although undoubted steps forward have been taken(boating license, new equipment, eco-incentives…) the world of boats (and of all those who enjoy boats, at every level) is still burdened, above all, by endemic vices. Beginning with a slow and complex bureaucracy, byzantine laws, asphyxiating obligations, excessive charges, inadequate, expensive and elitist landings, constant sea controls, and poor services. So let’s come up with some ideas, suggestions (in some cases, advice) to improve the industry by making boating (and nautical tourism) more efficient and accessible to an ever-widening public.

In multiple installments, theme after theme we will dissect problems and proposals to solve them for the 2025 beginning.

Professional skipper title still firm

The new position of 2nd Class Recreational Navigation Officer despite being introduced by a law of 2023 and regulated by several application circulars still fails to take off.

Blocking the exams that would allow the acquisition of the title of “professional skipper,” finally freed from the merchant sector, now seems to be only a formal obstacle: the ban on enrollment in the “first aid (First Aid)” training course hitherto reserved for seafarers of the “Gente di Mare.” Allowing access also to aspiring new officers (who are not among the seafarers) should be the Ministry of Health by a simple administrative act, as the Department of Infrastructure has already done with the other training courses planned for the new skipper. But this is not happening, despite protests and demands now coming from every front, government officials and Confindustria Nautica included. Even the Journal of Sailing has been engaged in a press campaign to this effect for months.

Proposal – Granted that it seems incomprehensible how the problem of access to training courses, for non-members of the Seafarers, was so underestimated when the rule was being drafted, what matters now is an awareness of the problem and the will to solve it. The right “push” can come mainly from the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport . Let it be active.

Nautical Tourism. Telematics registry, it can be done better

The establishment of the central telematics system for recreational boating with its various branches (Atcn, Ucon, Sted) has made an epoch-making leap in the management of nautical paperwork and made life easier for the boater. After some initial difficulties due to the migration of paper data to digital archives and some operational bottlenecks, delays in paperwork management currently seem to have reduced. But if boating bureaucracy has come out of the stone age, we are far from having landed in the digital world.

One only has to look across the border to nations such as Spain, France, Belgium or Great Britain to realize the gap that separates us from them. In these countries, e-government services, public portals and applications in mobile key now allow the yachtsman to carry out most of the paperwork (registration, cancellation, property transfers, duplicate navigation license, name change, personal data modification, etc.) autonomously from the web or via app. Without intermediaries, counters, queues, certificates to be brought or filled in, postal deposits to be shown, certificates to be produced, substitutes for certifications or “Dci” to be requested at great expense from third-party entities. In some countries these acts are free of charge and the documents issued digitally in real time. The suffocating bureaucracy that hangs over every boating practice continues to be one of the main causes preventing boating from really spreading.

Proposal – The digital transition of public administration is one of the pillars of the Italian “Pnrr” to which 25 percent of the allocated funds are allocated. It is necessary for recreational boating to benefit as well with the creation of a specific portal that allows the yachtsman to carry out the main administrative practices independently, linked to an app that duplicates its functions. One (very good) example is the one launched a few months ago by the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy (formerly the Ministry of Communications) that allows people to apply for the issuance of the “Rtf license” (the Limited Radiotelephone Operator’s Certificate), or the Radio Operating License directly online.

Boats: what end of life?

Too little is said about it, but the problem of disposal-rottage-recycling of recreational fiberglass and other vessels is increasingly pressing, with so many boats being abandoned in ports and on the shoreline or, worse, sunk or even burned.

Causing serious damage to the environment, marine life or at best taking up valuable space and deteriorating the landscape. The fact is that when the boat is no longer usable, there are few options open to the owner: either disposal and recycling or abandonment. And unfortunately, considering costs and difficulties for the first choice, many fall back on the second. For years, boating associations, ports, shipyards, environmental organizations, research organizations, European and national institutions have been studying the problem, holding conferences, but without offering concrete solutions.

Proposal – Start a census of abandoned boats by involving local governments, ports and maritime authorities. Create a chain of facilities to dispose of pleasure craft on the model of the French Aper (Association pour la Plaisance Eco-Responsable) where the operation is free of charge for the individual boat owner. Establish agreements with transport companies to facilitate the movement of boats to disposal centers.

Fabrizio Coccia

• In the next installment: Tourist Ports and Marine Protected Areas.