Today I’ll be touring Amels’ shipyard, where four of its 171s and one new 212 series yacht are underway. In the meantime, I thought I’d share my thoughts on a recent Amels’ captains’ conference (above). While the weather then clearly looks pretty miserable, trust me when I say the captains’ dispositions were a lot sunnier.
This conference wouldn’t normally be a news item for us. After all, plenty of megayacht yards host them. The difference this time is that Amels actively solicited the captains’ opinions for how to ideally design a yacht. The captains sat down with the yard’s design and marketing staffs and voiced what they liked and didn’t like about everything from engine-room configurations to the locations of helipads. They further debated the merits of diesel-electric versus traditional propulsion. Of course, the yard staff also asked for opinions on how to arrange crew’s quarters, something too few owners take into consideration. Usually the room left over after owners specify where to put saloons, gyms, and other guest areas goes to crew. However, crew and technical areas should have higher priority. Without a happy crew or accessible systems, the ownership experience is guaranteed to be miserable.
The part I really like about the Amels’ captains’ conference, however, is that they received blank outlines of decks and to-scale cutouts of rooms to plan ideal general arrangements. Imagine being able to improve not only your ability to do your job, but also the yard’s ability to deliver higher-quality yachts. Ater all, some of these captains will likely run future Amels’ launches.
As you can imagine, the captains greatly appreciated being able to share their opinions. Here’s hoping Amels commits the comments to memory and applies them with future series builds. And here’s hoping other yards borrow a page from Amels’ play book. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of the implementation of the idea, but it certainly is a rarity.
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