 President, Ocean Getaways
Date interviewed: August 2009
How did you get started as a charter broker?
I grew up in New Hampshire, and I have a master’s degree in psychology. I thought I was on my way to a Ph.D., but I discovered sailing late in my 20s. My first-ever overnight trip on a sailboat was from Fort Lauderdale to Tortola—an amazing first cruise—and once I got to the Virgin Islands, I discovered this whole world that I hadn’t known existed.
I started cooking on boats and taking jobs as a chef around 1980, and I met a captain named Brad Lavigne, and we fell in love. He’s now my husband and a partner in my business, Ocean Getaways, which we started because we saw an opportunity to bring larger groups and corporate groups onboard yachts. We opened up shop in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1984.
Corporate and large-group charters are a unique niche, for sure. What kinds of yachts are ideal for those kinds of bookings?
We only do crewed yachts, and with our groups, I’m really looking for boats that have similar-size cabins and amenities. We do a lot of catamaran bookings because there are a lot of them, and many have similar accommodations. In the megayacht category, a lot of the Browards have similar-enough cabins that we can use them. We don’t do bareboats or day sails.
Are corporate and incentive charters the only types that you book?
A lot of the people that we end up booking individual charters for, they originally come from our groups. Their company sends them on a corporate charter, and it surpasses their expectations, so they decide to do a charter by themselves later on.
These are people who don’t know enough to pick up Yachting magazine. We introduce a lot of people to the charter industry every year.
Do corporate and large-group charters tend to go better in certain locations?
A lot of the corporate bookings we do are incentive programs. For instance, Nestle will take their top 100 people on a vacation that includes a charter. So I have to find destinations that have the quantity of yachts we need.
Sometimes our groups are 200 or 300 people. We might need 30 or 40 sailing catamarans, which really are only available in the British Virgin Islands. That’s also a great destination for these types of charters because the islands are close together so you only sail for a few hours each day, which is important because a lot of these people are new to sailing and don't want to be sailing any longer than that.
What if large groups want to charter beyond the Virgin Islands?
The St. Maarten and St. Barth’s area also has a lot of appeal for these groups because there is so much to do onshore, and some of the sailing yachts that are available there are good for groups. We’ve also done some megayacht groups there.
Another popular place for us is the South of France, because groups will go and spend a few nights at a hotel in Monte Carlo, then sail from Monaco to St. Tropez to Nice.
Turkey, too, which a lot of the American corporations don’t think about, is a great place for sailing. And it’s beautiful cruising. Greece is also popular in that part of the world, and there we would work with motoryachts instead of sailing yachts.
I would imagine that the booking process for these types of charters is different than the process for individual vacations. What is the first thing you ask a new client?
I try to find out as much about the client as I can, to evaluate their expectations. I want to know if the group has run incentive programs before, to get an idea of their level of luxury and sense of adventure. Oftentimes, the groups are looking for very high-end things that will surpass what they did the previous year, so my groups may have been on a safari in Africa the year before and they want a ‘wow’ factor above that.
How do you deal with the fact that many of your charterers will be new to boating?
I have to spend some time educating the client about logistics and how charter works. Clients are always worried about seasickness—which isn’t really an issue in the Virgin Islands—and sometimes clients worry that the group will be too far separated aboard multiple yachts. So I have to educate them about the flotilla concept, about how all the yachts are anchored off the same beach and how there will be activities for the whole group.
Once a group’s charter is over, do they tend to come back for another year?
There’s always a thought in the incentive business that you can’t do the same kind of trip twice, but with charter, they often do—we just change up the level of boats, or the itinerary, or the overall destination.
What is the easiest way to begin booking a charter of this magnitude?
The ideal thing is for me to have a conversation with the decision maker, which is not always easy to have. A lot of times the decision maker is busy doing other things for the corporation. I often talk with the person I call 'the influencer,' who communicates what I tell them or invites me to make a presentation at the corporation. That’s always good, to be able to make that kind of presentation in person, because I can show instead of just tell by using photographs and PowerPoint slides.
My guess is that, with so many boats and people involved, there is an occasional challenge with these types of charters.
When you’re dealing with the number of boats that we’re dealing with, say 30 boats together, things can go wrong. Our challenge is to anticipate what might go wrong and try to prevent it.
We always accompany our groups, and the larger the group, the more staff we bring on our staff yacht, which sails with the group. We also have a high-speed chase boat for program support. Inevitably there are people who forgot medical supplies, or we have to chase down lost luggage, or a boat loses a part and we have to have someone hand-carry the part to the destination and the affected yacht. The clients don’t know this is going on in the background, which is of course how it should be.
So the guests are cared for by the crew aboard the individual yachts, with you and your team working as needed to fill in?
Right. We charter the best yachts that we can for the guests, and those crew do their job on those boats, but we have other ancillary crew handling things like the group activities. An example would be an extra chef setting up an afternoon beach barbecue while the individual chefs on the yachts are cooking breakfast for their respective guests.
Most charter yachts offer flexible itineraries so guests can go where they want whenever the mood strikes. With flotillas, does the itinerary have to be more scheduled?
You have to have a plan, yes, because there are some harbors where you can’t fit 30 or 40 boats. We need to make sure there will be enough trash disposal along the way, things like that.
We handle these kinds of logistics ourselves, which is why we probably do more group charters in the Caribbean than any other charter agency. Some other brokers leave those details to a designated “lead captain” in the flotilla, but we think it’s important to be there ourselves, and we know the crew appreciate our being in the background doing that kind of organizing. It makes everyone’s life easier.
Describe a large-group charter where you worked “above and beyond.”
We were at a private beach party in Virgin Gorda, and it was 10 o’clock at night, and a captain told us that one of his guests had wrapped a diamond necklace in a Kleenex—that got thrown away.
We had to track the garbage down in a Dumpster in Spanish Harbor. My husband and the captain went over from North Sound, and the Dumpster had been emptied. My husband tracked down the manager at the dump, and then went to the dump with the captain and a couple of flashlights.
By 5 o’clock the next morning, they had found the diamond necklace. One of the organizers of the trip couldn’t believe that we would do that—especially when he realized that my husband had forgotten his shoes on the boat and gone through the whole ordeal barefoot.
What else makes you different from other charter brokers?
Most of our groups are VIPs, and VIPs don’t like to wait in line at places like Customs and Immigration. I have, over the years, developed strong relationships with those types of folks in the local destinations, so we can expedite those kinds of processes. We’ve just been in the business so long that we can make that happen.
I also like to use the good local people ashore as much as I can for excursions and such, so that we are giving business back and developing even more local connections in case our clients need them.
What else should CharterWave readers know about you and Ocean Getaways?
One of the things that is distinct about us is that, because we do these group charters, we are sailing on yachts several times a year. So we don’t just know these crews and these boats from the boat shows. We are sailing with them and seeing firsthand how they interact with guests. We’re seeing how the boats look in the middle and at the end of the seasons, as opposed to when they are shiny at the early-season boat shows when most brokers see them.
I would also say that we’ve been in business for 25 years not just because we’re good at this, but because we enjoy it. We’re not going anywhere anytime soon. Our track record speaks volumes. I don’t just know the yacht charter industry, but I also know the incentive travel industry. There are a lot of details in that business and things that are important for a program, and my experience is significant in that area.
How can CharterWave readers contact you?
Our phone number is (239) 896-7278, my e-mail is
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, and our website is www.oceangetaways.com |
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