Lauren Beck is the former editor of Dockwalk and was with the publication from 2006 to 2023. At 13, she left South Africa aboard a 34-foot sailing boat with her family and ended up in St. Maarten for six years. Before college, she worked as crew for a year, and then cut her journalistic teeth at Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal online. She loves traveling, reading, tennis, and rooting for the Boston Red Sox.
Chief Stewardess Gabriela Bolivar is making a difference off the water as well as on. The 10-year industry veteran began her career in Venezuela after studying around the world and working as a consultant for the United Nations. She discovered yachting along the way.
These days, between her job as a chief stewardess, she opened GConsulting SXM in St. Maarten. “I saw the necessity [for] new crew to understand how to start in the industry, [and] some Spanish speakers want to be part of the industry, but they don’t know how to speak good English, and almost all the training is for English speakers,” she says.
“The main objective of our training is to provide our students with the knowledge, competencies, and skills necessary to perform jobs both individually and in the direction of high-performance teams, with standards of excellence, anywhere in the world,” Gabriela Bolivar says.
To further her goals, she began working with Mara López, the CEO of Yachting Butler Academy (YBA) in Palma, as the Caribbean representative of YBA. The two met on the dock at Port de Plaisance in St. Maarten six years ago. López has a background in hotels. “We both agree on the need to offer training in Spanish for professionals in the luxury industry in hotels, villas, and yachts,” López says. “I talked to Mara and I have been working together to help grow the Spanish market — South America, Central America, Europe,” Bolivar says.
YBA specializes in training in both English and Spanish, and they work with those on private or charter yachts, private estates and villas, and luxury hotels. “The main objective of our training is to provide our students with the knowledge, competencies, and skills necessary to perform jobs both individually and in the direction of high-performance teams, with standards of excellence, anywhere in the world,” Bolivar says.
YBA offers online and face-to-face personalized training, plus they select and recruit people for placement on yachts and in luxury hotels and estates around the world. “Above all, and that is what we teach at Yachting Butler Academy, we are ‘professionals’ who want to give the best of ourselves to make our guests on board have the best possible experience,” López says.
This column is taken from the February 2021 issue of Dockwalk.