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.
Acquera Yachting, a yacht agent based in the Mediterranean, is launching a new digital platform, AcqueraPro, to help captains in the Mediterranean. The platform aims to simplify vessel operations and increase efficiency and transparency.
Acquera, which has 21 offices across 11 countries around the Med, created the platform in concert with their clients after conducting market research into the most common problems captains and crew face. Alvise Tositti, Chief Strategy Officer of Acquera, explained that there is not one overarching digital interface that connects all the relevant parties during a cruise. That, combined with issues of red tape and bureaucracy when it comes to completing port documentation, spurred them to create a solution. And AcqueraPro was born.
Need to book a berth? You can use the platform to make the request. Need tickets to the hottest events in town? You can request the purchase through the platform. And if you need assistance, direct chat with geo-localization through the app is available so you can always reach someone at the agency closest to you, 24/7.
“We will always need support from our operations [people] in all countries,” Tositti says. “This is not a substitute [for] the people. This is giving the people a new tool to optimize their efficiency, both internally at Acquera and [for] the client.”
Apart from offering agent services, AcqueraPro streamlines the port arrival and departure process, immediately making available all the related costs. “We want to be the first to really give all the information in a simple way,” Tositti says. As he acknowledges, port procedures can be tedious, but this can help simplify the documentation process and allow the vessel to collect and reuse all their relevant documents. Instead of multiple back and forth emails between captain and agent, once the documentation is uploaded, it’s easily accessible on both sides and can be reused where relevant.
“We are trying to harmonize as much as possible,” Tositti says, but there likely will be documentation variations in each port. “We are trying to adopt the same format as much as possible, but unfortunately, we need to deal with the laws of the countries. [But] all the documents that you need to send us will be kept in the application,” he says.
AcqueraPro also includes the cost breakdown of the necessary services. In their experience, it’s been hard to find a complete overview of all mandatory port-of-call costs, which can make budgeting a challenge. AcqueraPro plans to have all the service tariffs — like berth fees, agency fees, pilots, etc. — available on the platform, which will eliminate any wait for quotes.
The first version of the digital platform will launch this summer and will start covering the main Mediterranean hotspots. The full version of the AcqueraPro app will be officially released in 2023. See the demo here.