Electronic boat cards are fine I suppose for some -- just not for me. If I want you to have my card I'll hand you one, if I have any that is!
An electronic boat card is an option. But just like most things that move from the physical/paper world into the electronic one, there is much gained:
- Your paper boat card will never show your friends where you are right now. Or where you've moving to. Or even where you're going next season, all depending on what information you want to share.
- Paper boat cards become impossible to organize and find once you have a few hundred of them. Last count, we had just over 700. If I needed to flip through them when I saw a boat coming into a harbor that I thought I knew, I'd never find the card by the time they were waving hello. Now I often know they're coming before I can see the boat and am reminded of their name, their dog's name, and that they like sushi.
- An electronic boat card can be made available to marinas or especially used to unlock fueling intentions. The potential for using that to save hundreds (thousands?) of dollars is coming. Paper cards only cost money to produce and don't usually have a mechanism of saving you money. There is a lot coming in this money-saving capability.
- Changes to an electronic boat card happen instantly and flow through to everyone who has your card.
- Your batch of friends' cards is as close as any device like your phone. Not too many people carry around their binders filled with cards so you only have access to the paper cards when you're in the same place as the binder.
I could go on and on but you probably get the picture.
Every move into the digital world takes some time and is often rejected early by many who are used to the older ways. That's OK and completely natural. This is one of those things that has so many advantages - there's nothing going to stop it.