Yachtmaster of ceremonies

We were in Budapest for the 24th edition of the Benetti Yachtmaster, a roving event focused on (mainly Benetti yacht) captains, around 110 of them for this edition, plus 30 or so marine surveyors, as well as some owner representatives and a handful of key industry people, plus partners and other special guests.

The purpose of the Benetti Yachtmaster is multifold. Of course, there’s the conference side of things, which this year was themed toward lifestyle on superyachts and the captain’s role in that, plus the client journey from design to post-delivery service, but it also includes a heavy weighting toward fun networking, and to enjoying and exploring the various cities and locations the event finds itself.

More evidence that Benetti doesn’t do things by halves was in the event’s main venue, the sublime Anantara New York Palace in Budapest, which Benetti took over in its entirety for the three-day event, along with its fashionably iconic New York Cafe. There is method to this marvellous madness – the conferencing facilities were large enough to cater to the 300 attendees, and housing everyone in the same place, particularly when a large number of them are captains, means cats are more easily herded.

After acclimatising to a Budapest shrouded in late-winter grey, the first day kicked off with a welcome from Azimut | Benetti Group CEO Marco Valle. The message was clear – yachting is about delivering the ultimate lifestyle and way of living, and captains are at the heart of that experience. “We’ve done 24 editions, and it has been 24 years that we have ranked number one on boats over 24 metres,” he began. “The year 2024 is just coming in, and this is the day for records because we have never seen so many people at this conference.”

“We have 110 captains sitting together and for us, this is of value, and we’re going to treasure it because this kind of conference is not the typical presentation. As in past editions, it’s our intention to get information from you,” he continued. “You are experts in your field, and we’re thinking right now about the boats of the future. To keep our leadership position, we have to consider all stakeholders, and captains, surveyors and owner’s representatives are key among them.”

For Sebastiano Fanizza, Benetti’s Chief Commercial Officer, the key to yachting is not just understanding the lifestyle but understanding that it’s evolving. “It’s a way of living,” he says, “and we add great comfort and luxury. But we all see how this lifestyle is changing – design is changing, the experience on board is changing, there’s exploration, sustainability.”

He continues that a decade ago, the luxury element was the inside of a yacht, with exquisite finishes that kept people inside, which also meant the luxury of privacy – so much so that in many photos of the era, you can barely see the sea from the interior. “Now we have different lines to target different clients who want different experiences on board,” he says.

“So, there’s the guy who wants to go exploring – they want their 40-metre steel-hulled yacht with a 5,000-nautical-mile range. But then there’s the guy who wants to stay outside with a big opening deck, which we call the Oasis Deck, and so on.”

This changing style of yachting and the changing nature of luxury means getting a clearer understanding of just what drives the modern yacht owner. It’s something that Benetti’s Customer Experience Manager Alessia Farci was keen to share some insights into. “In the last three years, the average age of a client was 52 years old,” she offers. “The beneficial owner is usually a man, but we know that 80 percent of the purchases are driven by women – it’s important to understand that the purchase is made for a couple and by a couple.

“Our clients,” she adds, “are families with on average two or three children – this is important because they’re becoming more environmentally conscious about the future, and they’re thinking about how they will leave things for their kids.”

Farci also places great emphasis on the fact that the key moment is not the delivery of the boat to an owner, but rather the entire journey it takes to get there with the client – and, in particular, the journey that continues after the owner and the boat have left the shipyard. It’s a facet that Benetti’s General Manager, Massimo Casoni, aims to put front and centre with an exciting new take on the post-delivery customer service offering.

Casoni is relatively new to the Benetti family, joining late in 2023 from his previous position as COO of Technogym, where he spent 10 years. Before that, he worked at Ferrari for 15 years, the latter part of his time there as a chief designer in product development for cars such as the California and the FF. It’s fair to say his luxury credentials – and his UHNW client experience – are solid.

“What I learnt at Technogym in particular is that it’s very important to build awareness in a brand, and to control the end-to-end process, avoiding any intermediaries between the customer and the company,” he begins. “In the yachting world it’s a little different – after delivery, you lose the customer because they’re managed by a brokerage company or the captain’s own net.”

Retention, he says, is connected to the ability you have to control the entire lifecycle of the product – and there is more value in the second phase from delivery to selling the yacht than in the construction and initial sale.

“If yards can control the second part of the life of a boat, the retention of customers will increase,” he offers. “This means putting on the table a suite of services starting with warranty but extending to things like making HVO available, preparing crew and captains, maintenance – the different services that follow the customer for the lifecycle of the boat. But,” he adds with a note of caution, “I don’t know if this industry is ready to do this yet. It’s not easy because you have to be consistent, but I think it’s necessary,” he continues.

“Perhaps in the future it will be something like a Benetti Owners’ Club, but today it means we’re investing in our service department. Currently, that’s mainly only warranty, and we have a sort of after-sales department for drawings or spare parts lists, but it’s only small.”

Now Benetti is redesigning its quality department, Casoni explains, and with Lusben – the refit yard in Livorno, Italy, which is also part of the Group – it will look to put different kinds of post-delivery services on the table. But it doesn’t stop there.

“Technology can help,” he enthuses. “We can imagine a large central control room where you have a huge screen displaying the situation of all Benetti boats around the world, with engine and other data, and with that the addition of artificial intelligence for predictive maintenance. I believe we can do a good job, and we’re ready to start this process.”

It’s part of the aim to offer personalised and easily accessible services dedicated to the owner and crew, and assistance guaranteed by the yard no matter where the yacht is. Indeed, each Benetti yacht will have a service manager as a point of reference for any type of assistance.

There’s another factor looming large over the yachting landscape that Benetti is already taking huge steps to accommodate, and that’s the transition toward more sustainable fuels. In particular, Benetti has committed to using HVO – hydrotreated vegetable oil, a second-generation renewable diesel that cuts well-to-wake emissions by up to 80 percent compared to fossil diesel – both for its sea trials and also as an option for delivered Azimut and Benetti yachts.

Indeed, during a conference session on the first day, the Benetti team asked the audience of captains how many would fill their tanks with HVO if Benetti was not only able to organise bunkering for the fuel, but also subsidised it to deliver cost parity with conventional fossil diesel. The response was striking – hardly any captains raised a hand. A quick probe of this surprising reaction suggested a considerable lack of knowledge about HVO even among professional yacht captains, highlighting the task that both Benetti and the wider yachting world have in educating owners and crews, and getting them to change.

“HVO is a question not just for Benetti, but the entire Azimut | Benetti Group,” Casoni says. “We believe we have to formulate the initiatives that can have the biggest impact.

“We’re building boats that are HVO-ready and, in a few months, that could lead to a very high impact in terms of sustainability. But, as you saw, it’s not easy – it’s about education.”

An education also followed in the sessions before the end of the first day as Sebastiano Vida, Benetti’s Head of Product, showed how different lifestyles impact the design of yachts from first conversations with customers, and how new design features – like the Oasis Deck or the recently unveiled Verandah Deck, both developed from studies on space utilisation – can influence an owner’s decision to purchase.

The second day – after we managed to defeat Mr X and escape the vast confines of the museum – featured an interesting interactive afternoon led by Luxury Hospitality that gradually filtered delegates into leadership personality types. It was then extended into workshops on leadership culture for captains and crew with a view to professional development, as well as recognising and managing the challenges that come with living and working together as crew.

As if to put that knowledge to immediate use, the day closed with a spectacular gala dinner-dance cruise on the River Danube with a theme of Moonlight Wonders and instructions to wear a hint of gold. I’m torn as to whether it was comforting to have 110 captains on board as we plied the waters between the two halves of the fascinating and beautiful city of Budapest, or terrifying that we had 110 captains on board after the joyous pandemonium of the morning’s team-building exercise.

Either way, it was a fabulous event to bring the conference to its official close – and for me, it delivered another one of those incredibly surreal moments. All I could do was smile, have a drink, and take it all in for the second time in two days. And that, right there, is the magic of the Benetti Yachtmaster conference.

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