Former Purser and Chief Stewardess Ciara Farrow stepped off yachts and into tech. But those yachting skills remained at the forefront of her new endeavor: Sevenstar, software that helps crew manage guest preferences and provisioning. “I was in the industry for seven years, and during that time, I was just always frustrated with guest preferences,” Farrow said. “I kind of wanted to pull my hair out a little bit sometimes, and I thought there [are] no tools for stews and for chefs and for all crew, really, to streamline that [preference] information. So I built Sevenstar.” Farrow has no formal tech experience, so she taught herself what she needed to know and built the app through trial and error. The software allows users to create guest profiles in the app and consolidate all the information about each person in just one location. “I felt that having a form that can automate and streamline all that information and then create profiles that you can update and edit in one centralized location would help a lot of crew,” Farrow said. The digital preference sheets can be sent to your guests so they can input their likes, dislikes, allergies, and other notes. This creates a profile in the app. You will be notified any time a change is made to the profile. Once you’re ready, you can print the preference sheets as PDFs and share them with the relevant crew, knowing you have the most updated info available. You can include drink and food recipes within the app and even allocate recipes to individual guests. It’s easy to share those with the chef, and it can even make interior setup a snap — just take a photo in the app and tag it to a specific location. This can also help make onboarding new crew easier as you can include any information you’d like that shows new crew how to get the job done. The yacht owner benefits, too, Farrow says. It’s far easier to collect all the owner’s preferences in the app, so when a new chief stewardess steps aboard, they will have quick access to all the owner’s likes and dislikes, honed over months and years. It would save a lot of time — Farrow’s experience was that it takes about three months on a new boat to really understand the owner’s likes and then a few months more to perfect things. “If you can have that information there right away, especially in an industry with such high turnover, I feel like it would just make everything less complicated,” Farrow said. It can also help the boat save money — getting guest provisioning and preference sheets months early can help the crew better prepare and hopefully eliminate those last-minute urgent delivery fees. Ideally, Farrow would love to see Sevenstar standard on all yachts. “I found it to be a huge challenge — different vessels take preferences in different ways, and they always get lost or are outdated. If there were just one way that everybody was doing it, it would be less complicated, and you can always have the most up-to-date information at your fingertips across any device.” Farrow can also adapt and update features based on crew feedback — while the app launched in 2023, it has been scaling for the last year, with private and charter yachts now using the software. Farrow made some updates since FLIBS last year, including slicker forms, more conditional forms, instant email update notifications, and it’s now more mobile-friendly. And a better guest experience cascades down into, hopefully, a better crew tip. Sevenstar is currently $999 a year for private vessels and $1,999 for charter yachts. Triton covered Sevenstar in our Offboarding section of the magazine. Read more.