Excelerating towards a better experience, a captains story
We caught up with Captain Julian Sincock to hear about his experience with Excelerate so far and his future requirements. Julian is the Captain of busy charter yacht Princess AVK, a 48 Metre Sunseeker Motor Yacht based in the South of France – here’s what he had to say.
We have just completed our third season with Excelerate. Season 1 was a disaster with another supplier but we changed to Excelerate for Season 2 and we’ve never looked back. In Season 2 Excelerate were our VSAT satellite broadband provider and Season 3 we also bought into their Business Grade Multi Roaming 4G Data Sim capability. I have already confirmed that we will be proceeding with Excelerate for Season 4, our third year with them but this isn’t because of any contractual obligation. It’s because since we went with Excelerate my crew and my workload in managing owner and guest experience regarding our onboard internet has been a breeze compared to what it used to be.
In short Excelerate’s service works exactly how they describe and when I need their support it is there on tap, it’s like having my own IT department on-board.
A season for us is typically 12 weeks commercial charter and 6 weeks owner usage sailing anywhere in the Mediterranean, which means activity and workload is hectic to put it mildly. Some time ago I described our experience with Excelerate’s Satellite Broadband Service as the best I had ever experienced in all the time I’ve been involved in yachting, I can now say the same about their 4G data Service and whilst they may not be the cheapest, the fact that we installed one of their sims into our router at the beginning of the season and we’ve not had to touch it or buy another sim since, wherever we have cruised, makes it worth every Euro. In addition, their Yacht Connectivity Manager allows automatic or manual management of all available networks so that we can manage owner and guest requirements, expectations and costs.
The VSAT costs and performance are completely predictable but Excelerate also keep us informed each month about whether we are keeping within our 4G data bundle or we need to top it up ensuring that we never get caught out without 4G capacity or overspend unless we want to.
The other thing that I like about Excelerate is that they can integrate hardware and manage the networks in real time meaning that we don’t have a variety of suppliers blaming each other if something goes wrong. I really like the idea that they behave like an unpaid consultant and I am always bouncing ideas off them to try to keep ahead of the game and to try to further improve our onboard experience for everyone – whilst keeping costs under control. We are already discussing some ideas for next season.
So far this partnership approach with Excelerate has meant that I have been able to achieve a better service for my owner and our charter guests at lower cost.
I am struggling as to why some of my peers tolerate what might appear to be a cheaper service but then spend so many hours apologising to guests for poor internet and spend so many hours dealing with unnecessary problems which surely must be a false economy. We are not complacent and certainly don’t have money to burn so Excelerate are really competitive, probably not the cheapest, but based on our experience definitely the best value with a human touch.