What a crew costs, line by line

Crew is the largest single line in the running cost of almost every yacht above thirty metres, and it is the one owners estimate worst, because the published salary tables are only about half of the real figure.

The crew list, by size of boat

What sits on top of the salary

Flights home for every crew member on leave, which on an international crew is not a small number. Medical insurance to a standard the Maritime Labour Convention expects. Training and certificate renewals, which on the technical side are expensive and continuous. Uniforms, replaced every season. Crew food, budgeted per head per day and a genuine morale issue. Payroll administration and, depending on the structure, employer social contributions.

Together these add roughly twenty to thirty per cent to the base salary bill.

Rotation

Two people share one job, each working a month on and a month off, or two on and two off. It began with engineers and captains on hard working boats and has spread to whole departments on the largest yachts. It costs roughly double for the positions it covers and it buys three things: rested senior crew making safety decisions, a boat that keeps its people, and a genuine succession plan when somebody leaves.

Owners resist it on cost and then adopt it after their second captain leaves. On a boat over seventy metres it is now effectively the market price of a good officer.

Where the money is well spent

The chef, out of proportion to the salary. Guests forgive almost everything except the food, and a chef who can feed twelve guests and thirteen crew from a galley the size of a bathroom is worth whatever they ask. The chief engineer, for the same reason as the captain: a good one prevents invoices. And the chief stewardess, who is the reason the interior looks the way it did in the brochure in year six.