Minimum Standards: Why Yachting Has To Stop Settling For The Basics
- Yachting International Radio
- Jun 30
- 7 min read
Yachting has spent years selling itself as an industry of excellence.
The yachts are exceptional. The destinations are exceptional. The guest experience is expected to be exceptional. Every detail is polished, planned, corrected, refined, and protected.
Yet when it comes to the people who keep those yachts moving, the industry too often falls back on a very different word.
Minimum.
Minimum safe manning. Minimum standards. Minimum training. Minimum support. Minimum requirements.
For an industry that depends entirely on human performance, that should make everyone uncomfortable.
Kayleigh Liddell, Crew HR Manager at Hill Robinson, is part of a growing movement inside yachting that is challenging this mindset. Her work sits at the intersection of crew support, HR, yacht management, people culture, retention, and the difficult question of how an industry built around vessels can start putting more structure around the people onboard them.
Her message is not complicated. Yachting needs standards. But it also needs to stop treating the minimum as the goal.
Why Minimum Standards Are Not Enough
Kayleigh did not arrive in yachting through the traditional route. Born in Portsmouth and raised on the Isle of Wight, she was surrounded by the sea but not by superyachting. Her early career began in education, training, student support, recruitment, and HR.
What connects those roles is people.
Before joining the yachting sector, Kayleigh had already built HR systems from the ground up in previous companies. Policies, handbooks, welcome packs, recruitment structures, student care, staff support, and workplace systems were already part of her professional language.
When she entered yachting, she quickly discovered that much of what would be considered basic in many land-based industries was either missing, inconsistent, or treated as optional.
That is not because yachting has no good people. It has plenty. It is because the industry has developed in fragments. Different flag states, vessel sizes, private versus commercial use, managed versus unmanaged yachts, owner preferences, captain styles, and budget decisions have all created a landscape where standards can vary dramatically from one boat to the next.
For crew, that inconsistency matters.
HR Is Not The Enemy
The term HR can make people tense. In many industries, it carries connotations of rules, restrictions, paperwork, and people being told what they cannot do.
But good HR is not about suffocating a workplace. It is about creating clarity.
In yachting, HR should not be seen as a threat to captains or crew. It should be seen as a structure that helps everyone understand expectations, rights, responsibilities, communication routes, and support systems.
A welcome pack is not bureaucracy. It tells crew what they are walking into.
A compassionate leave policy is not softness. It recognises that crew are human beings with families, emergencies, and lives beyond the vessel.
Training budgets are not luxuries. They are investments in better crew, better leadership, and better retention.
Clear policies are not there to replace common sense. They are there to support it when pressure rises, personalities clash, or decisions become difficult.
This is where yachting has to mature. HR, or as many land-based industries now call it, people and culture, is not about turning yachts into offices. It is about recognising that yachts are workplaces, homes, and high-pressure environments all at once.
That combination requires structure.
Captains Cannot Carry Everything Alone
One of the strongest themes in this conversation is the pressure placed on captains.
Captains are expected to lead the vessel, protect the owner’s interests, manage guests, oversee safety, maintain operations, handle budgets, support crew, manage expectations, deal with conflict, and often act as the face of every decision made onboard.
Increasingly, captains are also spoken about as CEOs.
But that framing is dangerous if it does not come with proper support.
A CEO ashore usually has departments, legal support, HR teams, finance teams, systems, reporting lines, policies, and board structures. A captain may carry similar levels of pressure without the same support beneath them.
That creates a serious gap.
When something goes wrong onboard, responsibility often lands with the captain. But if the captain is not the employer, not the flag state, not the owner, not the management company, and not the person controlling every resource, where does real accountability sit?
This is one of yachting’s biggest structural problems. Responsibility can sit everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Captains need tools. They need policies. They need management support. They need clarity. They need structures that allow them to lead fairly without being left exposed when difficult decisions have to be made.
The Crew Are The Operation
Yachting often talks about yachts as assets. They are bought, maintained, refitted, marketed, insured, managed, and moved around the world with enormous care.
But without crew, the asset does not function.
A yacht without crew does not deliver a guest experience. It does not leave the dock safely. It does not maintain its standards. It does not create the memories owners and charter guests are paying for.
That is why cutting crew support is so short-sighted.
When budgets tighten, the first things cut are often the very things that help crew perform well: training, bonuses, development, support services, better insurance, or proper HR systems.
This may save money in the short term, but it costs the industry in retention, morale, trust, and professionalism.
Crew are not an accessory to the yacht. They are the operating system.
If the industry wants better retention, safer vessels, stronger leadership, and more consistent service, it has to stop treating crew support as optional.
Shipyards Could Be Untapped Training Spaces
One of the practical ideas raised in the conversation is the role shipyards could play in crew development.
During operational periods, yachts are busy. Owners may arrive. Charters may be underway. Crew may be rotating, travelling, training elsewhere, or preparing for the next programme. Finding time for full-team development can be almost impossible.
Shipyard periods offer a different opportunity.
When the yacht is out of guest operation, there may be more room to bring crew together for leadership training, communication workshops, mental health awareness, team building, HR briefings, and people culture development.
This requires coordination, but the potential is significant.
Shipyards already understand that crew experience matters. Good facilities, gyms, restaurants, transport, and social events can influence where yachts choose to spend time. Adding structured crew development into that environment would be a natural next step.
If the industry is serious about professional standards, it needs to use the moments when crew are actually available.
Collaboration Matters More Than Competition
Yachting has a reputation for privacy, competition, and gatekeeping. That is changing, slowly, but the old habits remain.
Kayleigh points to the importance of collaboration across management companies, employment companies, trainers, wellness providers, brokers, shipyards, captains, and crew organisations. No single group can fix the culture alone.
The industry needs shared language around standards.
It needs to recognise what is already working and copy the good things without ego. If one company builds better HR systems and others adopt them, that is not a loss. That is progress.
Competition can raise standards when it pushes everyone to improve. The danger is when competition becomes secrecy, or when companies treat crew welfare as a marketing angle rather than a working commitment.
Yachting does not need another echo chamber. It needs practical collaboration that reaches the boats, especially those without strong management support.
The Boats Being Left Behind
Not every yacht has a management company. Not every vessel has a strong shore-based structure. Not every owner understands the real operational value of crew support.
This is where the industry becomes vulnerable.
Larger, well-managed yachts may have access to more support, but smaller vessels, private yachts, and boats under certain tonnage thresholds can operate with far less structure. Crew on those vessels are still crew. They still live onboard. They still work under pressure. They still deserve clear standards, support, and protection.
If yachting only improves at the top end, it leaves too many people behind.
The industry has to ask what basic support should exist for anyone employed as crew, regardless of vessel size, flag, ownership structure, or management status.
That does not mean every yacht will have the same resources. It does mean the industry should stop accepting huge differences in how people are treated.
Minimum Is Not Good Enough
The most powerful idea from this conversation is also the simplest.
Yachting needs to stop aiming for the minimum.
Minimum may be useful as a legal floor, but it should never become the cultural ambition. No owner wants minimum safety when their family is onboard. No guest wants minimum service. No captain wants minimum competence. No crew member should have to settle for minimum support.
Standards matter because they create consistency. But the mindset has to shift from “what is the least we can get away with?” to “what is the most responsible way to run this vessel?”
That shift would change everything.
It would change how owners are educated. It would change how brokers sell the reality of ownership. It would change how management companies build support systems. It would change how captains are backed. It would change how crew are retained.
And it would change how seriously yachting is taken as a professional industry.
A Better Industry Starts With People
Yachting has no shortage of ambition. It has money, talent, innovation, and global influence. What it still needs is more consistency in how it supports the people at the centre of the operation.
Crew HR is not a fashionable add-on. It is not paperwork for paperwork’s sake. It is part of building safer, fairer, better-managed yachts.
People culture is not a soft concept. It is the foundation of retention, leadership, communication, accountability, and professionalism.
The industry cannot keep relying on the goodwill of good captains, good managers, or good owners. Good practice needs to become normal practice.
Because yachting is built on crew.
And crew deserve more than the minimum.