What It’s Like to Work on a Yacht

Few things on earth are more expensive than a megayacht — it’s a private, fully staffed, floating resort for the ultrawealthy. Shows like Below Deck provide a glimpse of life onboard, but the reality is even more surreal, says a former stewardess who worked on yachts for more than a decade. Her bosses were yacht owners (so, billionaires), and her job was to anticipate and manage their every whim in close quarters. Here, she talks about what yacht crews hate the most (inflatable slides), the indignity of scrubbing self-tanner off of white upholstery, and the weirdest ways that the super-rich spend their money.

Working on a yacht, you’re in a very intimate space with these extremely wealthy people. What is that like?
You’re a fly on the wall, but it’s very one-sided. You learn so much about the owners and guests, and they’re not learning anything about you. As a stewardess, I was doing food service and housekeeping and going through people’s personal belongings, folding their underwear and putting it away. I would overhear conversations, on the phone or in person. This is kind of graphic, but you even learn stuff like how frequently they poop. In yachting, anytime somebody washes their hands, the stewardess dries out the sink afterward. If they put something in the trash, you empty it right away. Every time you go check the bathroom, you make it look untouched. So you learn all their habits. With my previous boss, I would get a sense, like, “oh, he hasn’t eaten in a few hours. He probably wants a snack.” And I would put together a snack for him, and he’d come out and say, “Oh, I was just about to ask you for this.”

How did you get into the industry?
I met a friend of a friend who was on a yacht crew. At the time, I was one year out of college, working a miserable office job and paying student loans. I had always played it really safe, and I was itching to break out of my shell. I thought, I have 40 years to work at a desk job. I’ll give this a try for a little bit. Then, I ended up doing it off and on for 12 years.

I started in Fort Lauderdale, which is the U.S. capital of yachting, and I rented a bed in what’s called a crew house. It’s like a hostel for yacht crew, and people stay there when they’re between jobs. You typically pay by the week. I took a weeklong course called the STCW, which teaches things like basic firefighting, basic first aid, sea survival. When you complete it, you can start looking for work. At the time, I think the course cost about $1,000, and you have to take a refresher every five years. I also took an additional course that teaches about how to handle pirates.

What was your first job?
I didn’t know what I was walking into. I worked for a bachelor who had multiple boats and used them exclusively to throw parties. It was wild. In most cases, we were just tied up to the dock, because then you can have more people onboard. The guests were typically girls in their early 20s, blonde, skinny. They would all say they were models. Then, there would be a small handful of 45-ish-year-old men, lots of vodka and diet Red Bulls. We were always hiring bathroom attendants to try to limit drug use on board. The captain had to have talks with the owner about it, too, because his license would be impacted if anything were to happen. One morning, I woke up, went upstairs, and saw a girl giving a guy a blowjob on the deck. Nobody saw me, so I just turned around and walked back down. I never saw anything that seemed involuntary. I think the girls were aware that they weren’t going to find the love of their lives there.

I never had any issues with how people treated me on that job. I’m not that tall — no one is going to mistake me for a model — and I was wearing a uniform. The problem was that it was just messy. Most yachts have white carpets and white couches and white bath towels, and here were all these girls with self-tanner rubbing off on everything, spilling drinks, and leaving half-drunk cups everywhere. At a certain point that felt almost disrespectful. We had to schedule crew to be awake 24 hours because there was usually some straggler up until dawn. One morning, I was cleaning up this huge mess, and I remember looking out over the water and thinking, What am I doing with my life? Why did I leave my friends and family behind to work on this boat, cleaning up after people who don’t even know my name? We were working all the time, constantly on call. If the owner wasn’t around, he’d tell his friends to use his boat. When I left, I swore I would never do parties like that again — I just wanted to work with families.

My next job was working for a really old guy, over 85. Older owners are very different. Unless they have grandkids, they don’t use water toys, like inflatables and Jet Skis. And you wouldn’t believe how much time it takes to set up water toys, take them down, clean them, and maintain them. Inflatable slides are the worst. Yacht crews hate them. They’re very heavy and they take a long time to put up. And, of course, you’ll spend all this time setting it up, and then the owner or principal guest will say, “You know what? I don’t like the spot. Let’s move the boat.” And you have to take it all down again.

The older guy I worked for, he was very routine and polite. But he was also very flirtatious with me, even when his wife was around. I was 25 at the time, and he said to me on multiple occasions, “You can come down to my cabin after you’re done tonight.” I never felt threatened by it, and the captain was aware of it. But there’s no doubt that I was sexually harassed for the year I worked for him. It was mostly just annoying — the awkward smile, nervous laughter. But aside from that, he was great to work for.

Sometimes, the wives can feel threatened by pretty stewardesses. But I think I’m just unattractive enough that no wife is going to be threatened by me. You do see some interesting marital setups, though. I’ve worked for more than one couple with separate master rooms. There’s one boat in particular where the owner, who is pretty well known, had a long-term mistress. When he would use the boat with his family, they’d have family photos out and all the wife’s things in the closet. And then when the mistress came, the crew would have to put away the family stuff and replace the wife’s things with hers. They were always flip-flopping.

What about privacy? Did you ever work with celebrities who were worried about paparazzi?
Most yachts are very private, and even the outdoor areas have some level of privacy. The bigger issue is on land. Paparazzi will hang out at the private airports or near certain restaurants. But not that many celebrities own yachts, actually. Their net worth aren’t high enough. Yacht-owning money is next level. Yachts are so expensive that most of the owners are just businessmen you’ve never heard of. You couldn’t tell them apart from some other grandpa. I definitely had celebrity guests from time to time, but they were always friends of the owner or charter guests.

Did you always live onboard?
Yes, almost always. The free housing was important to me. Most crew cabins are set up with a bunk bed. About half the time, I was sharing with another crew member, and half the time, I wasn’t. The cabins have very little storage, so I barely had any stuff — just the bag that I lived out of, the uniforms I wore. I was fine with it. Some crew members get a storage unit, but I just kept a couple of things at my parents’ house, like a nice pair of leather boots and a long winter coat that I obviously didn’t need on the boat.

The last boat I worked on was really small; it was for weekend travel, and the crew cabins weren’t set up to be truly livable. So we all stayed ashore in the Hamptons. That’s actually quite common out there; a lot of people have smaller boats, and they rent housing for the crew. But the housing in the Hamptons is absurd. One of the places they rented for us was a two-bed, one-bath apartment with no air-conditioning, and it was $12,000 a month. It was covered by my employer, but paying for my half would have wiped out my salary. Another house where we stayed was listed at $75,000 for the summer.

What were your hours like?
When you don’t have guests onboard, a typical day is 8 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. A lot of people don’t realize how much time you spend at the dock or anchored with no guests. These yachts are full of equipment that needs repairs all the time. Things need to be taken apart and cleaned and maintained. You have to wash the whole boat regularly.

Then, when you do have guests on, you’re typically working 16-hour days, every day, for the duration of the trip, which could be three weeks or longer. I often worked from 5 or 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. I’m a morning person, so if there was another stewardess, I’d take the early shift and she would do nights. You have a stewardess available at every hour that guests are awake. Sometimes, you have certain guests who get up early and others who stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. having drinks. If you’re a solo stewardess, you might not get a break.

When you’re crossing oceans, that’s a very different experience, and there’s usually never guests onboard. You’re bobbing around a lot. Everything’s stowed or tied down so it doesn’t break. Glass objects or decorations are tucked away and strapped down. I worked for one guy who wanted to go on a longer trip like that with his guests, and the weather was not looking good. We advised him against it, but he didn’t want to change plans. So we had an extremely bumpy trip and almost everyone got seasick. We had someone throwing up over the side of the boat. We had people fighting over the bathrooms. The owner’s daughter threw up on the floor. I was sick too, but I was also working, so I was trying to pretend like everything was okay, giving guests buckets and cold towels and cleaning up other people’s puke. The owner did feel really bad, and he gave all of us $500 as a bonus.

What kind of salary did you make?
You’re salaried by the month, typically. Pay is largely influenced by the size of the boat and your experience level. Starting salaries for stewardesses are between $2,500 and $3,500 a month. I got lucky in my first job and was making $4,000 out of the gate with no experience. I was paid up to $7,500 or $8,500 by the end of my career, especially if I was working on a bigger boat. And your housing and food are covered, because you’re living on the boat. You also get health insurance. My take-home pay could vary a lot. I think the most I ever made was maybe $120,000 a year. Which, especially in your 20s, not paying rent, is good money. It’s also pretty common to get an annual bonus, sometimes one month’s salary.

If you’re working on a charter, guests are expected to tip at least 20 percent. It doesn’t always happen, though. I once did a ten-day charter with a family over Christmas and New Year’s. We should have been tipped thousands, but instead my tip was $300. When people tip badly, sometimes they get blacklisted — if a charter broker hears that their client didn’t tip, they might not want to work with them in the future. Word goes around, and then maybe the captain or the owner won’t want to rent their boat with that charter broker anymore. The industry is small and people gossip a lot. Reputation is important.

There’s also a lot of demand in the industry — it’s grown a ton over the last couple of years. During COVID, anyone who owned boats was using them all the time, and anyone who didn’t went out and bought them. There’s still a wait list for yachts being built. It created a huge demand for crew. So I was working nonstop.

What else would cause someone to be blacklisted?
Being really heinous to the crew or trashing the boat. The last guy I worked for, I’m pretty sure he was blacklisted by a number of charter agents. He had his own smaller boat, but he also liked to charter big boats once or twice a year. And he always had to charter a different boat, probably because he wasn’t welcome back on previous boats — they would just say it was unavailable.

The word they use in the industry is particular — as in, “Oh, that owner is very particular.” A lot of owners have certain ways they want things done. And once you learn them, it’s routine and can be easily managed. This guy, whenever he wanted something, he would want it immediately. One time, he caused a huge scene at the front desk at a resort in the Bahamas, to the point where hundreds of people were staring. He wanted his kids to have a “fast pass” at the water park at the resort so that they could skip lines; that’s offered somewhere like Disney, but they didn’t have it at this resort. Initially, he asked the crew to arrange it for him, and when they couldn’t, he got angry and went to the front desk himself. After making this huge fuss, he disappeared into the back with the manager for a while and then came back out with a guy wearing a T-shirt that had “Fast Pass” written on it with a marker. There’s no doubt in my mind that he paid someone off and got this guy to escort the kids around, like a human fast pass, so they could cut the lines. That owner was a piece of work. But I also worked for plenty of people who were lovely.

Was it crazy to watch how some of these people spent money?
I worked on a 47-meter boat that chartered for $250,000 a week. And that just covers use of the boat and crew; it doesn’t include fuel, food, or other fees. So, you could see how these numbers add up very quickly, especially if people are taking a private jet to and from the boat, which they often are.

I worked for one family who was incredibly cheap. They drank off-brand soda, like the grocery-store brand. They would also steal towels from resorts. If they ever went to a beach, they would come back with the towel from the lounge chair. Other people weren’t intentionally cheap — they were just no frills. I worked for a family from the Midwest who, if you saw them, you wouldn’t know that they were multimillionaires. They’re just meat-and-potatoes, vanilla-ice-cream kind of people. Their kids shop at H&M. At one point, we needed a new welcome mat on the boat, so I asked the owner’s wife if I could buy one, and she just went to Kmart and bought one herself.

Another owner was an elaborate spender. He always wanted to outdo his friends. He would have these hugely over-the-top birthdays. One year, he spent more than $50,000 just on a fireworks show. He wanted the premium version of every water toy, the fastest Jet Ski with the most features. He would go to a restaurant and order everything on the whole menu, even if it was just two people at the table and they were going to throw most of the food away.

Did it ever affect the way that you spent money, to see how these people were living?
I was always careful with my money. But some crew members aren’t. Part of the problem is that the places where yachts go are very expensive, so as soon as you get off the boat, you’re spending a lot. A gallon of milk in the Bahamas is like $11. If you take a taxi ride, it’s easily $100. Then, some people get caught up in the lifestyle. For guys, it was always about the watch. The owner’s got a nice watch; the captain has a nice watch; they want to get a nice watch too. Which is fine for them, but it wasn’t something I cared about. Who am I going to impress? Not the owners; they have millions of dollars and $100,000 Rolexes. The area where I spent money was travel. I’d work for a couple of seasons and then take a break. I backpacked around the South Pacific and in Asia several times. And I was a budget traveler, so I was able to stretch my money really far.

Were you able to save money?
Yes, quite a bit. When I left, I had over $100,000 in cash and over $350,000 invested. It’s good money, but there are so many sacrifices that come with it. When you break it down to an hourly rate, the pay is not great. And you don’t have control over when you’re working. That was a big reason why I finally left; your whole life is very much dependent on another person’s movement. And they always want to have their options open. I knew someone who had to quit a job because the owner wouldn’t let her take time off to go to her best friend’s wedding. I knew another guy who missed his brother’s wedding. The owner was like, “You need to be here,” and then he didn’t even end up using the boat that day.

Was it hard to make the transition back to a more traditional job?
When you’ve worked on a boat, a lot of people in the corporate world do not take you seriously. Below Deck is their only point of reference. But my skills as a stewardess are very transferable. I was lucky; I did some networking and leaned into other work experience that helped me secure a position in tech that pays over six figures, but that’s very rare. I think my stewardess experience is incredibly helpful in my current job, particularly in managing other people. I’ve been around multimillionaire CEOs for years; I’m not easily intimidated, and I can work and stay composed under pressure.

I do miss it sometimes. The office view was great, and it was different every day. The work was always interesting, and I was good at it. I never struggled to find a job. I do think I stayed for too long — I should have left the party a little sooner. But I’m glad I did it.

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