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lf you’re a businessman,
chances are at some point you have found yourself standing exasperated
in a hotel room at a corporate “getaway,” reading line by line
down the sponsor’s crammed itinerary of product speeches and feeding
times, wondering why in the heck you accepted the invitation in the first
place.
If you’re a good
businessman, at some point you have realized that resorts and cruise ships
and all the other places most companies take you to woo your loyalty are
okay, but that really, you’d just as soon have gone out for dinner
with the principal players instead of being bussed around to tourist meccas.
“It’s all nice, but you don’t spend any time with people,”
says Nick Trotter, president of Meridian Yacht Charters. “It’s
almost like it’s a nametag tour, and that’s not where the value
is in developing business relationships.”
Trotter, who used to
run resorts in the British Virgin Islands, has seen his share of corporate
cattle-calls. So when a businessman approached him about two years ago
and said he wanted to create something different, something better—something
memorable—for his best clients, Trotter knew a yacht charter was
the way to go. From his Virginia office, he organized a weeklong, five-yacht
extravaganza in the Caribbean. The businessman invited his top suppliers
and their spouses, all of whom spent a week enjoying the yachts, the watertoys,
the five-star service, and one another’s company. “You would
never see his company name on anything at all—no bags, no hats, nothing
like that, which they thought was cool because it’s very high class,”
Trotter says. “Their goal was to show those people the time of their
lives.”
The businessman figured
he would do the charter event once, then go back to less-expensive options
like resorts and cruise ships. But before his party even got back to the
dock, he had asked Trotter to begin coordinating another, bigger corporate
event for this winter. “They find out when they do it that it exceeds
their expectations, and not just in terms of fun,” Trotter explains.
“It allows them to spend time with people in a way that they didn’t
imagine was possible before.”
That’s one of the
keys to winning at big business: getting people to believe in something
they didn’t even imagine was possible. For many people, even at the
highest end of corporate pay scales, yacht charter is that “something.”
For all the industry’s growth in the past decade, charter remains
an activity pursued by a relatively small club of in-the-know clients.
Most people don’t think of it when it comes time to vacation. Only
those who are truly knowledgeable think of it when it comes time to talk
business.
Suzette McLaughlin,
a charter broker in the Palm Beach, Florida, office of Camper & Nicholsons
International, has arranged two charter events for a heavy-hitting company
in the automotive industry. Both were in the Caribbean and planned at
least a year in advance, and each included ten separate yachts. “If
you take the boat, the provisions, the first-class tickets and land activities,
these programs are easily over a million dollars,” she says. “You’re
not going to find your average, everyday corporation doing this, but if
they compare it to a five-star resort—which these guys are staying
at anyway—apples to apples, it’s not that much more.”
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2: “It allows them to spend time with people in a way that they didn’t
imagine was possible before.” > Page 1, 2
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