If you’re a businessman, 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 bring 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 and said he wanted to create something different, something better—something memorable—for his best clients, Trotter knew yacht charter was the way to go.

From his Virginia office, Trotter 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 water toys, 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, even bigger corporate event for the following 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 in-the-know think of it when it comes time to talk business.

Suzette McLaughlin, a charter broker in the Palm Beach 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 10 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.”

Trotter says a five-yacht event like the one he arranged would start around $300,000 for the week, and that the uniqueness of it is exactly what companies are willing to pay for. It makes even the busiest high-level clients not only want to attend, but to keep coming back year after year.

“They really want to be there,” Trotter says. “This is invitation-only, and there is a business aspect to it. You have to be good enough to go.”

One of the motoryachts that Trotter selected for his client's second event is the 138-foot Blue Harem, a popular charter boat with a reputation for throwing great parties. The client specifically asked for a yacht that could handle a wrapup gala, and in most cases, that means a motoryacht.

“A lot of them have nice dining saloons where you can spread out and have good meetings as well as corporate cocktail parties,” says Bonnie Mims, the former charter fleet manager at Koch, Newton & Partners, which coordinated Blue Harem’s schedule. “The sailboats, while they’re beautiful, lack the exterior entertaining areas that may be good for corporate charters—especially if you’ve got three or four boats chartering together, you’ve got eight to ten people per boat, so that’s 40 or 50 people for one evening gathering.”

Mims says the crew aboard Blue Harem is also a good example of what corporate clients should seek out.

“Capt. Carl [Zanziboni] is flexible,” she says. “He works well with people and with large groups of people. He makes things happen in an effortless way. Then it’s cleaned up and you don’t even know what happened.”

CharterWave editor Kim Kavin saw this firsthand during a theme party thrown aboard Blue Harem at an industry-only Antigua charter yacht show. The affair drew at least a hundred  attendees, all of whom were given feather boas, colorful masks and strings of pearls to wear. The excitement raged late into the night, but early the following morning, the boat was in tiptop shape.

Of course, a corporate charter can be done with far less fanfare aboard smaller, less-expensive yachts. “Mid-range, even if a company wanted to treat their sales managers to something, it’s out there,” McLaughlin says.

That type of charter event can be fun, for sure, but it definitely won’t send the same message as a week aboard a fleet of private luxury yachts in paradise. And at the end of the day, isn’t the impression a corporate getaway makes what really matters?

No good businessman wants his guests feeling like they’re on a “nametag tour.” People should be eager to come back next year. They should leave thinking: “How can I stay on that guy’s good side in case he does this again?”

“You can’t buy that with ads or over the telephone,” Trotter says. “You have to really build these personal relationships in business with the right people. And that’s what these guys who are successful are able to do.”—Kim Kavin