Creating the ultimate superyacht experience

Few things, it’s fair to say, can beat the experience of being on a superyacht, particularly when you are on board with family or friends. For some, the desire to experience more leads them to more adventurous cruising grounds – perhaps exploring the Pacific, or the higher latitudes of Alaska or the Antarctic. But for a few, there is a growing desire to take it one step further by making it truly immersive, and truly experiential.

At this point, it’s easy to assume that this must mean one of a handful of things – perhaps carrying a submersible to see below the waves, or carrying a helicopter to heli-cruise remote lands or heli-ski remote glaciers, or perhaps even drawing on technology to create a virtual experience. In reality, those at the cutting edge of the superyacht experience are drawing on all these elements combined, and more.

It’s called – by those in the know – experiential stagecraft, and it’s opening new doors to incredible experiences for owners, their families, and their guests. The yachting industry has seen something similar before, albeit in a limited context – Dutch superyacht builder Feadship, for example, built an experiential room on its stand at the Monaco Yacht Show in 2015, which treated visitors to an immersive movie about what it takes to build a Feadship, complete with complementary sensory augmentation such as the smell of metal being welded or the feel and scent of a cool sea breeze while standing on deck.

The demand for such experiences on board yachts has been quietly gathering momentum, accelerating since the impact of COVID, travel restrictions and lockdowns left people yearning for something more expansive. What’s more, ‘bored billionaire syndrome’ – as Andrew Grant Super, Managing Director of experiential engineers Berkeley Rand, a BWA Yachting company, calls it – is further driving development in this exciting area.

“We tend to be approached when a client wants to go back to a location they have previously visited on several occasions and they want to have a very different experience,” Super explains. “They don’t want to sit there and watch the world go by. And often the industry forgets that they have children, who have probably been heli-skiing by age eight which means there’s not a lot left you can show them.”

Crucially, says Super, these owners, their families, and their guests – who could be politicians or rockstars or fellow titans of industry – want an experience that is beyond a curated trip into some coves that thousands of people have been to before, or playing on the latest water toys. “They want something dramatically more than this,” Super says, “and sometimes when they want to go to a special location it’s because they want to live it and breathe it. So it’s very important for them that they are immersed in an experience that covers all the senses and takes them to places that they’ve never seen and will never see again, a landmark moment in their life that galvanises who they are, where they are, what they enjoy, what they love, and where their passion lies.”

Superyachting, of course, already offers this sort of experience to some extent, as Super freely admits. “If you want to go to the edge of the Earth, Antarctica, or deep below the ocean to the Mariana Trench, or go into the deepest, darkest corners of the world that have barely been discovered, or go heli-skiing, there are specialist consultants and companies who can help you take on the more wild and adventurous superyacht expeditions. But for us, it’s about personalising everything to the actual individual and making a new world come alive right in front of them.”

While Berkeley Rand does combine ‘technology with authenticity’ to create experiences, it’s not simply a case of slipping into a virtual reality world. Berkeley Rand’s team of designers and engineers spend months piecing together intricate and highly personalised experiences, which can incorporate anything from a portable pop-up restaurant and a Michelin-starred chef for remote dining experiences, to fully immersive onboard pods that incorporate sensory technologies including sound, sight and scents, to spectacular aerial light shows using hundreds of coordinated drones, to ‘escape room’ experiences that use entire ghost towns or desert islands as their stage, to sensory interactions with the aurora borealis, to augmented reality experiences that can bring the history, mythology and wildlife of your cruising ground to life before your eyes.

“The underwater world is like going to another planet, but sometimes people don’t want to leave the deck of a yacht to experience it,” Super says. “So we have done things such as making the yachts invisible, and allowing them to see right below the yacht and around the yacht as if it’s not there, deep into the ocean, with super high definition camera technology to live and breathe and feel what’s going on underneath and throughout the whole journey.”

There’s another benefit to this approach aside from just creating incredible experiences, though, and that’s education. “We’re working closely with many oceanographers, with sustainability companies, to create incredible adventures such as tracking the migration routes of marine mammals,” Super enthuses. “We’re using augmented reality to understand the enormity of what might be a 2,000-miles-or-more journey. We’re using AI for what’s called natural language processing, a way of communicating with mammals, with whales – which is quite phenomenal and a very moving experience for guests. And we are able to use our tech to see a million years before and a million years ahead and everything in between to see the trajectory of the damage done, or the re-creation of coral reefs through various means. Owners, guests and their kids,” Super concludes, “can physically see it all and they can immerse themselves both in where they are as an individual in that cycle, and also in how to understand it better.” Few things, it’s true, can beat the experience of being on a superyacht, but when that cruise educates and inspires – and leads, potentially, to understanding and to change – then that surely is the greatest experience of all.