How a Croatian yacht brokerage sells in every language now

Translation is the AI that has earned its place in luxury yacht charter. Jennifer Kerum, co-founder of Anchor Croatia, a luxury charter brokerage on the Adriatic that also books in the Caribbean, Greece and Italy, uses it for client email in every language her buyers speak, and for a brochure library that was English-only for most of her nine years in business.

Marketing content is the second. Everything else — matching a client to a boat, judging a crew, deciding whether a bay is safe to anchor in — is still done by people, deliberately.

What is AI actually used for in a yacht charter business?

Language and marketing. Asked what has worked, Kerum went straight to translation.

"Something that's really worked really well for us is the integration of translating. I can speak to someone from China, I can speak to a lot of people in China, Spain, all different languages. And it's not hard. It's so easy. And it's not like how Google Translate was ten years ago, where it wasn't that great of a translation."

Her description of the old failure mode is exact: "You're trying to say, 'Can I please have a coffee?' And it's like, 'I will give you a cat.'"

The gap between those two states is the whole adoption story. Translation that is intermittently wrong is unusable when a client is about to commit six figures to a week on a boat. Translation that is reliably right disappears into the workflow, which is why she calls it easy rather than a project.

Why does translating a brochure change the economics?

Because it turns a hiring decision into a task. Charter brochures are the sales asset in this business, and Anchor Croatia's were in English only.

"All of our yachting brochures have been in English, and the thought of hiring someone to translate all of these brochures — I mean, we have a whole list of boats in Croatia, including our own boats that we own. And now it's super simple. We can actually take a brochure, we can cater to that market, we can see what works, and it's great."

Translating a brochure library used to carry a fixed cost, which meant it only happened for markets already proven worth entering. Now it is cheap enough to do speculatively: produce the material, enter, see what works. Market entry stopped being a bet and became an experiment.

Her summary of where AI sits today: "I'd say more on the marketing front and on communication is where we currently use AI in our company."

Which tool does she use for the translating?

Gemini, inside the email system her team already opens every morning.

"In terms of AI within our email system, Gemini is super easy. Gemini is something super easy you can use. It's integrated into our email system, which can easily translate all of your emails for whatever person that you're talking to."

What has changed on the client's side?

Clients now arrive with a destination already in mind, because they researched it themselves.

"In terms of where people want to go, when they ask a place, it's a lot easier for them to research. They're like, 'I would love to go to this island or this place or see this bay,' which is really cool."

Kerum's framing: "I feel like people are taking charge of their own vacations, their own worlds." Work that used to fall to the broker now arrives done. It also, on her account, arrives confidently wrong often enough to be its own problem: pricing that is not real, and itineraries that are not geographically possible.

What should you copy if you sell internationally?

• Check the AI already inside your email first. Kerum's translation stack is a feature of a subscription she already had.
• Translate the sales asset, not the homepage. The brochure is what closes a charter, so that is what got translated first.
• Treat a new language market as a test. Produce the material, enter, see what works, and stop if it does not.
• Re-test quality against your memory of it. Kerum's benchmark was Google Translate a decade ago, and the gap is what convinced her.
• Keep the judgment calls out of it. Language is repeatable. Matching a client to a boat is not.

What is she refusing to automate?

The crew assessment, because that is what a broker actually sells.

"One of the things that makes yachting special is not even the boat, it's the people. When I go on a boat and when I go to a yacht show, I'm looking at who's the hostess, who's the captain, everything like that. So that's really important to me. Because all five boats can be the same. They could be the same model, the same everything."

Five identical boats, five different charters, and the variable is a crew you can only assess by standing on the deck. Kerum's position is not that automation should be limited, but that it should fund more of that work rather than less: "You're not stealing humans' jobs. You're making it easier for both of us, to be honest with you."

She is preparing a separate AI-focused brand, Luxury Yacht Rentals, launching in the coming months. It is the second time she has bet on a channel the incumbents were ignoring; the first was social media, roughly nine years ago, against brokerages trading since the nineteen fifties.

The decision worth making this week: list the sales assets your business holds in one language only, and price what it would cost to have them in three — now, not what it cost two years ago.

Where this comes from

S1E2: How a luxury yacht company uses AI without losing the personal touch — the full interview with Jennifer Kerum. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.