Yachtung — Turning a Luxury Brochure into a Sales Channel
01 — Context
A world-class brokerage with a digital blind spot
Yachtung is a luxury superyacht brokerage founded on relationships. Five offices — Monaco, Fort Lauderdale, London, Kobe, Dubai — and over a decade of serving ultra-high-net-worth clients across yacht sales, charter, management, and berth transactions. Their fleet spans €395,000 entry vessels to €36,000,000 flagship superyachts.
For most of their history, 91% of business came through the broker's personal network. Word of mouth, referrals, yacht show relationships. The website existed to validate credibility, not generate pipeline. That was fine — until it wasn't.
A new generation of UHNW buyers had arrived. Younger, digitally fluent, research-first. They were landing on yachtung.com before calling anyone. And when they arrived, the experience they found was the digital equivalent of walking into a luxury boutique and being handed a printed index.
The business problem was simple: a premium inventory with premium pricing served by an experience that felt commodity. The solution wasn't more features — it was rethinking what a digital channel should do for a brokerage that had never needed one.
02 — Diagnosis
The data told a harder story
Before forming any hypotheses, I spent two weeks purely in observation mode. Analytics, session recordings, CRM data, broker interviews. What I found was a product that looked polished on the surface but failed at its fundamental job: connecting high-intent visitors with the right yacht and the right person.
Industry benchmark: 58%
on listing pages
for a €2M+ decision
not digital
The drop-off analysis was damning. Visitors were landing on the search results page and immediately hitting a wall: 12 filter options, none of them intuitively prioritized for a buyer. Type, length, guests, cabins, builder, year, flag state, beam, draft, price, region, engine type. A checklist built for a broker, not a buyer.
Conversion funnel — Pre-intervention
Source: Google Analytics + Hotjar session data, 90-day rolling average pre-engagement.
The qualitative findings sharpened the picture. In 12 user interviews with UHNW prospects (recruited through an industry partner network), the same themes repeated: they felt anonymous on the site, didn't know which broker they'd be working with, and couldn't tell why one €4M yacht was better suited to them than the similar one listed next to it.
Three broker interviews added the supply side: their highest-value clients asked the same three questions before anything else — "What's the use case," "What's the budget," "What are the dates." The website never asked any of them.
"We ask those three questions on every first call. If someone came to us having already answered them, we could skip 20 minutes of discovery and get to the good part — the match." — Monaco broker, Yachtung
03 — Hypotheses
Five bets, three validated
With the diagnosis in hand, I structured five hypotheses to test — ranging from high-confidence quick wins to more speculative bets on UHNW behaviour. Each was tied to a specific metric, a test method, and a defined success threshold before we touched code.
Hypothesis validation tracker
| # | Hypothesis | Test method | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| H1 | UHNW visitors drop off because listings feel identical — no signal to differentiate or self-qualify | Session analysis + 8 usability tests with think-aloud protocol | ✓ Validated 7 of 8 participants couldn't articulate why one listing was a better fit than another |
| H2 | A 3-question concierge intake ("Yacht Match") will increase inquiry quality by pre-qualifying intent | Clickable prototype test with 10 UHNW participants; A/B test post-launch | ✓ Validated +57% qualified lead rate vs control; brokers rated intake leads 2.1× higher |
| H3 | Reducing mobile search from 12 filters to 3 primary decision factors will improve mobile inquiry rate | A/B test on mobile; 2-week runtime with 50/50 split | ~ Partial +62% session depth but inquiry rate lift was 18% (target: 30%). Simplified further in v1.1. |
| H4 | Adding named broker profiles + credentials to each listing will increase inquiry-to-contact conversion | Moderated usability test; heat map comparison pre/post | ✓ Validated Inquiry-to-response rate +39%. Buyers clicked broker photo before CTA in 6 of 8 tests. |
| H5 | An inline charter availability calendar will eliminate the email-to-ask friction for charter intent | Prototype walkthrough + 5 charter client interviews | ~ Partial High intent signal — but UHNW clients still preferred calling to confirm. Calendar became a trust signal, not a booking tool. |
04 — Process
Sixteen weeks from insight to live
05 — Before & After
The same inventory, a different experience
The before and after were not about visual redesign. The information architecture, the sequence of decisions, and the relationship between visitor intent and product response — that's what changed.
Search Experience — Before vs After
12 undifferentiated filters. No persona. No intent capture. Generic "Enquire Now" on every card.
Concierge intake in 3 questions. Curated results page. Broker introduction before the CTA.
Listing Page — Before vs After
No broker. No trust signal. No next step differentiation. Generic description copied from spec sheet.
Match context from intake. Named broker with credentials. Differentiated CTAs. Buyers know who they're talking to before they enquire.
Charter Availability — Before vs After
Complete black box. No self-serve. Email and wait. Unacceptable friction for a €150K+ purchase decision.
Live availability. Instant signal. Became a trust marker for seriousness — even clients who still called confirmed they'd "already checked the calendar."
06 — MVP
Three features, one principle: qualify before you ask
The MVP scope was deliberately narrow. Every feature that made the cut had to reduce friction between visitor intent and broker contact. Every feature that didn't make the cut — virtual yacht tours, AI pricing tools, owner dashboards — was explicitly deferred, not rejected. The discipline here was the product decision.
07 — Results
The numbers, 8 weeks post-launch
2.3% → 4.7%
broker-rated close potential
pages per session
68% → 41%
up from 1m 12s
booked via Yacht Match
Key metrics — Before vs After (8-week post-launch)
8 weeks post full-traffic launch. Qualified lead rate measured by broker assessment during first call. n = 214 digital inquiries.
Inquiry conversion rate — 20-week rolling (Pre to Post launch)
Conversion rate was flat at ~2.22.4% for 12 weeks pre-launch. After Yacht Match went live at week 13, the 8-week average climbed to 4.7%.
08 — Reviews
What users and stakeholders said
"For the first time I didn't feel like I was browsing a database. It felt like talking to someone who actually understood what I was looking for before I'd said a word."
"The Yacht Match flow is exactly right. Three questions, and it already knows my budget range and timeframe. That's what every broker asks — you've just built it into the site."
"I checked availability before calling. When I spoke to Jean-Pierre I already knew the dates I wanted. The conversation jumped straight to the boat. That's how it should be."
"Mariam completely changed how we think about the website. We were afraid to change what had worked for years — but the data was undeniable, and she made the case clearly without overcomplicating it."
"The qualified lead improvement alone justified the entire engagement. The first call with a Yacht Match inquiry is completely different. Clients arrive knowing what they want. We close faster."
"We went from treating the website as a brochure to treating it as a proper sales channel. That shift in how we resource it, how we think about it — that came directly from this work."
09 — What I Learned
Three things I'd do differently
Broker buy-in is a product problem, not a comms problem. The broker trust layer required us to photograph and credential 14 brokers across five time zones. We scoped this as a content task. It was actually a product problem — brokers worried their clients would be reassigned if they were visible. We needed to solve the incentive structure first. We got there eventually, but it delayed the launch by 10 days.
UHNW behaviour is not luxury behaviour. I entered this engagement assuming that the premium audience would respond like luxury e-commerce buyers — visual, status-driven, impulse-adjacent. Wrong. UHNW superyacht buyers are research-heavy, trust-first, and relationship-dependent. The product had to earn trust before it earned the inquiry. The concierge flow worked because it mirrored how a broker would behave, not how a luxury retail site would behave.
The calendar is a trust signal, not a conversion tool. H5 was "partially validated" because we measured it against the wrong metric. The availability calendar didn't drive direct bookings — UHNW clients still call. But it dramatically changed the quality of those calls. Buyers arrived pre-informed. That's value, but it's measured in call conversion, not click conversion. Future evaluation needs a broader attribution model.
The single most important decision in this engagement was the one we didn't make: we didn't try to remove the broker from the process. We built the digital channel to make the broker more efficient, not to replace them. That framing changed everything — it brought the brokers onside, and it made the product honest about what it actually was.
Interested in working
together?
Open to new opportunities, consulting engagements, and conversations about hard product problems.
Get in Touch