Customer Excellence in Yachting

Our vision is to make the ocean accessible to more people. Our mission is to drive innovation in the yachting industry. Innovation needs startups, startups need investors, investors need revenue, and revenue needs customers. For us, the chain starts with the customer.

At the boat shows in Cannes and Monaco this September, almost everyone agreed: customers have changed, the technology works, other industries have shown the way. Yet the core of the industry moves slowly. This whitepaper looks at yachting from the customer's side. What do owners and charter guests need, where does their experience break today, and why does the change take time?

The customers are changing

The customer base of this industry grows every day. UBS counts nearly one million new US-dollar millionaires in 2025, more than 2,600 a day. Knight Frank expects a third more people worth over USD 30 million by 2031.

And it changes in three ways. Needs move from ownership to experience: in the United States, participation in charter and rental rose from 17 to 27 percent in four years. Wealth moves to women first, then to the next generation: USD 54 trillion will pass to widows by 2048, and 81 percent of next-generation clients plan to switch wealth manager after inheriting. Clients come from more places: the new US boat buyer is around 36, nine years younger than established owners, and their path to purchase is "digital-first and self-directed".

The customer of tomorrow does not compare boat against boat. They compare the experience against their bank, their airline and their hotel.

Six needs, one benchmark

What the yachting customer wants is well researched and has been stable for years. Six needs stand out: time, honest expectations, a personal relationship with one point of contact, well-being over display, use over ownership, and discretion and trust.

Among 359 charter clients, crew quality was the strongest driver of service quality, more than twice as strong as the yacht itself. Among charter clients, well-being fully explains whether a good experience leads to a rebooking.

What has changed is the standard customers compare against. For the wealthy client, that is often the private bank. Its app shows every account, every investment and every fee in real time. For the yacht, often among the largest assets they own, they get a broker's estimate on request and a spreadsheet after the fact.

Where the experience breaks

The boats themselves score high. The breaks are in information, cost, flexibility and the relationship around the boat. In the United States, about 40 percent of first-time buyers leave boating within five years. 42 percent name surprise costs, 70 percent have no trusted adviser. A 30-metre yacht costs about EUR 2 million a year to run, around EUR 140,000 per week of own use.

Charter guests are mostly happy with the boat and the destination. Their breaks lie in booking, handover and service: fixed Saturday-to-Saturday weeks, extras on top of the price, four to six hours of waiting at handover, slow repairs on board. Across the evidence, three break points matter most.

Ten customer megatrends

Customers bring their expectations on board. They learned them in banking, travel, cars and at home. Someone who books a hotel that remembers the room, tracks a parcel by the minute and sees every investment in one app expects the same on the pontoon.

There is a guardrail. Digital convenience from the mass market is not enough in luxury: it fails on immersion, personalisation and credibility. Every megatrend works only if the person stays and the system carries.

Other luxury markets have shown how

In 1986, Executive Jet, today NetJets, launched fractional ownership. Customers bought a share of an aircraft instead of the whole jet and got guaranteed availability at 24 hours' notice. Twelve years later Berkshire Hathaway bought the company. Fractional ownership, boat clubs and charter memberships follow the model private aviation built forty years ago.

The pattern repeats across luxury. Chrono24 and Rolex Certified Pre-Owned made used watches trustworthy. Bring a Trailer made every collector car sale price public, the closest analogy to yacht brokerage. Addepar and iCapital put all of a client's wealth on one screen, from listed shares to private equity. The yacht is still missing from that screen.

The winners built trust before convenience: authentication, visible prices, curated selection, and a person backed by good systems. The paper compares ten industries and also names the limits: not every pioneer wins, and often the incumbents who own distribution and trust take over in the end.

Why the core moves slowly

In 1919, when more than 7.5 million cars and trucks were already on American roads, the number of horses and mules on US farms reached its all-time peak. For the coachman, business had never been better. Good revenue can hide a shrinking customer base: US boat unit sales fell 21 percent between 2018 and 2024 while the average price rose 78 percent.

Like every industry, leisure marine moves along an S-curve. At the edges, charter booking and boat clubs are rising. At the core, in brokerage, yards, marinas and service, little has changed yet. Two of the classic outside triggers are present: platforms and a new generation of customers. A binding rule for leisure boats is still missing.

We propose nine hypotheses for why the core stays flat, on three levels. At the level of the market, the pain is not big enough, exclusivity is part of the product, and potential new customers are invisible. At the level of the company, firms are too small and too busy, opacity pays, and innovation happens mainly in products. At the level of the individual, people had bad first experiences with AI, built their success with the old model, and fear for their role.

"AI, go away." CEO of a brokerage and charter company, Cannes Yachting Festival, September 2026

What it will take

Customer excellence in yachting will come. The open questions are when, and who moves first. Three conditions have to come together: an outside trigger, an offer that serves the customer's needs measured in the client's time, and an owner by name inside the company, with a mandate, a budget and trusted voices who go first.

Newcomers bring speed. Only insiders bring the trust. In leisure marine, both can still lead the change.

The full whitepaper covers the customer data, the owner and charter guest journeys stage by stage, all ten megatrends, the ten-industry comparison, the S-curve positions of each segment and the rules from outside yachting that are already forcing digital processes. Download it above, and then tell us where we are right and where we are wrong.