FLOATING LIFE THE PURE PLEASURE OF ENJOYING YOUR YACHT

"We’ve turned the emphasis around”, says Barbara Tambani, CEO of Floating Life. And there’s more. “We’ve given back the shipowner the pure pleasure of enjoying their yacht”, adds Andrea Pezzini, director and co-founder of the company that twenty years ago created Yacht Management team in Switzerland that’s absolutely peerless in the yachting sector. The roots of his family have been firmly in the sea since 1800, and Floating Life today is the result of the wealth of all that culture, experience and passion made available to its customers.

“We wanted to create a company and make it different”, they explain from their headquarters in Vacallo. “If in the past management was always oriented toward the commanders, we focus our attention on the shipowner instead. We handle everything, leaving them just the pleasure of enjoying their yacht”. Yacht Management deals with everything: accounting, security, technical and administrative management, maritime safety and support with the regulations and laws of each individual Country the yacht could find itself in at any given moment. “It’s a service with a strong administrative and accounting profile”, explains

Tambani. “Because maintenance has become increasingly expensive. While yachts of over 100 metres have crews of 50 or more, even small-medium yachts, between 27 and 37 metres likewise need crews that can have up to 8 or more members. They are, in effect, small companies with a budget and a financial structure that has to interface with reality. Shipowners today are increasingly aware of this and want all the details, so we provide them with a hyper-detailed budget, rigorous controls and a meticulous search for savings wherever possible”. But it doesn’t end there. Because today the yacht is also a symbol, and this has opened a world in itself.

As the company’s CCO Filippo Rossi points out, its’ no surprise that Floating Life’s new slogan is “Your dream … our passion”, because “our customers want something else, above and beyond services adequate for the experience they imagine they’ll be having”. So, in addition to the technical/ administrative part, Floating Life has developed a vast range of services tailored to the customer, from simple caretaking to itineraries and on to a virtually infinite range of services on-shore capable of satisfying any need, desire or even whim. Yacht Management inevitably opens a door to chartering, another service that Floating Life offers and manages on the market in quite a different way. “It makes us perform at our best because we’re working directly with the owner”, says Rossi. And if on one hand we give the owners the guarantee that their property is in good hands, on the other whoever charters the boat has the absolute certainty they won’t have any nasty surprises once they’re aboard. “It’s a challenge every time for us, and every time we put all our passion into raising the bar. From the moment the customer leaves their home, they’re never abandoned to their own devices. From transfers to restaurants up to the choice of ports and excursions along the course. All the yachts are checked by us to avoid any problems by preventing them. It’s an extremely detailed job because our organisation itself is detailed.

The fleet we manage is spread over every corner of the world, we work with Italians, Chinese, Indians, Americans and more. Every nationality has its own culture, with different cuisine and customs. That’s why we can’t leave anything to chance”. The relationship of trust we manage to create leads us to another of Floating Life’s areas of expertise, which is new construction. “To any shipowner looking to build a yacht from scratch we offer all our experience in the choice of shipyard and design”, points out Pezzini. “There’s nothing more beautiful and romantic that starting out with a blank sheet of paper and designing a dream that’s destined to come true. A dream followed step by step in its realisation by our expert team of surveyors”.

And on the subject of dreams, the launch of the Dream 42 will be the apotheosis. “It’s a project that for us is absolutely visionary. This yacht we’re building in fractional ownership will have seven owners sharing the costs, and the pleasure. In terms of technical quality and innovation it’s the dream of every shipowner. But it’s also the dream of Floating Life, which in Dream 42 has put the fruit of everything we’ve learned from the sea in these last twenty years”.