How to write a yacht stewardess CV

A chief stewardess hiring for the season has a stack of CVs, a charter starting on Saturday and about ten minutes. She is not reading your CV. She is scanning it for six things, in an order that has nothing to do with how a land CV is built. Once you know the order, writing a stewardess CV is mostly a matter of putting the right facts where her eye lands.

This guide covers the green stew and the 2nd or 3rd stew with a season or two. If you are already leading a team, the same rules apply with a management layer on top.

What a chief stew reads first

The first screen on a yacht CV is short. One commonly cited figure is around six seconds before the keep-reading decision. In that time a chief stew looks at, roughly in this order:

1. The photo. Presentation is the job, so your photo is judged as a work sample. Head and shoulders, smiling, hair tied back, ironed white polo or blouse, natural light, marina or plain background, taken by someone else. No selfies, no sunglasses, no filters. The full spec is in the yacht CV photo guide. In one captains' survey nearly all wanted a photo, and a noticeable share said they reject a CV without a good one.
2. The personal block. Nationality, visas with expiry dates, current location, availability, smoker or non-smoker, visible tattoos. "Palma, available immediately, Schengen valid to March 2027" is a candidate she can put on a boat this week.
3. STCW and ENG1, in date. Without both you cannot legally sign on.
4. Food Safety Level 2. Chief stews specifically prefer junior interior crew to arrive with it done.
5. Which service styles you have actually performed. Silver, plated, family-style and buffet are different skills. She reads them as such.
6. Whether your land hospitality was at a real standard. Fine dining, five-star hotels, private households, events, cabin crew. This is the strongest feed into the interior department and it is the reason she will call you.

Everything else, she reads only if those six passed.

The structure

The order below matches what agencies re-format CVs into and puts the six things above on page one.

1. Name and target position ("Stewardess" or "3rd Stewardess", not "Crew")
2. Contact block: phone with country code, WhatsApp, email, location, availability
3. Personal details: date of birth, nationality and passports, visas with expiry, languages with honest levels, smoker, visible tattoos, ENG1 status, driving licence
4. Profile, five or six sentences maximum
5. Certificates, maritime first, every one with issue and expiry dates
6. Yachting experience, daywork included and labelled as daywork
7. Land experience, kept separate, written like crew work
8. Education, one line
9. Interests, three to five specific ones
10. Three named references with phone and email

Two pages maximum. One page if you are green. If you have no yachting experience yet, delete that section entirely rather than leaving an empty heading.

The certificates a stewardess needs

• STCW Basic Safety Training and ENG1 medical, both dated. Non-negotiable.
• PDSD (Proficiency in Designated Security Duties), usually taken with STCW.
• Food Safety and Hygiene Level 2 as a minimum. Level 3 reads well for 2nd stew and up.
• WSET Level 1, then Level 2 once you are earning. Wine service is what separates a 3rd stew from a 2nd.
• GUEST interior modules are recognised across the industry.
• Multi-skills: barista, mixology, floristry, massage, yoga, nails, hair, childcare. A stew-plus gets picked over a stew, and family charter programmes actively want childcare.

Two things to avoid. Do not buy a stack of introductory courses before checking what job adverts actually ask for; working crew consistently say the money was better spent on runway in a hiring hub. And do not list a course you have booked as if you hold it. "Food Safety Level 2, booked, completing October 2026" is honest and shows commitment.

Writing the experience lines

Every boat is one line the reader can parse in a second: role, M/Y or S/Y, the vessel name in bold, length in metres, private or charter, Month Year dates. Then two or three fragments with numbers. Guests, cabins, covers, charters, crew supervised.

Name the surfaces. Name the service styles. Name the events. Never write "service" on its own.

Before: Responsible for providing exceptional guest service and maintaining the interior to the highest standard.

After: Silver and plated service for 12 guests, breakfast to dinner. Heads and beds across 6 guest cabins: turndown, amenities, marble and leather care.

Label-prefixed bullets are a genuine interior convention and work well where a role spans several areas:

• Service: silver and plated for 10 guests, themed dinners, champagne on the swim platform
• Housekeeping: 5 cabins, turndown, high-value surfaces
• Laundry: guest and crew, pressing, couture and dry-clean-only garments

Laundry deserves its own line on every stew CV. It is half the job on most boats and most junior CVs skip it. If you can press a shirt and handle a silk dress, say so in those words.

Turning hotel and restaurant years into crew lines

This is the part green stews get wrong most often. The land jobs are not "unrelated experience". They are the whole case. The mistake is describing them as duties instead of standards.

Pull each job apart and re-describe it in the words a chief stew uses:

Before: Worked as a waitress in a busy hotel restaurant, delivering excellent customer experiences.

After: Silver and plated service for up to 40 covers a night in a 5-star hotel restaurant. Ran a section of 6 tables. Wine service from a 300-bin list.

Before: Babysitting for a local family.

After: Sole charge of two children aged 4 and 7 for a private family, planning activities and managing routines.

Before: Cleaning job at a guesthouse.

After: Presentation standards across 12 rooms including care of marble, leather and antique furniture.

Two or three lines per land role. What you did, to what standard, with a number. If you are working from a land CV, upload the CV you have and it is rebuilt in this format: the personal block, the certificates with dates, the vessel lines, and the land jobs rewritten as standards.

Daywork on a stew CV

Daywork is the standard route in and belongs on the CV, labelled honestly. Scattered days are best aggregated into one entry:

Apr 2026 to May 2026, Interior daywork, Palma and STP. 31 days across 9 yachts, 35m to 75m: deep cleans, crew laundry, inventory counts, charter turnarounds. References from M/Y [name] and M/Y [name].

The number of days, the range of boats and the actual tasks are what make it credible. Collect a reference after every single daywork job. For a green candidate, a named yacht reference is worth more than another certificate.

The profile

Five or six sentences. What you are looking for, who you are, what you bring. Pick one voice and hold it: either first person throughout or the pronoun-free style throughout, never both in one paragraph.

Stewardess with one Med season on a 50m charter motor yacht and four years in five-star hotel and fine-dining service. Silver and plated service for up to 12 guests, cabin detailing across 6 cabins, laundry and pressing including couture. Food Safety Level 2 and WSET Level 1. Seeking a 2nd or 3rd Stewardess position on a 50m+ charter programme.

No "hardworking", no "passionate about hospitality", no "team player". Captains and chief stews name those as the phrases they skip.

Interests are not filler

Crew live together. A chief stew uses the interests line to judge whether you fit her team and whether you bring anything guests want. "Travel, socialising, music" says nothing. "Yoga (200-hour teacher training), sea swimming, sourdough, learning Spanish" is a hiring argument. Three to five, specific and true.

Three mistakes that bin a stew CV

1. A photo that reads as a night out. Hair down, sunglasses, a bar in the background. Fix the photo before you fix anything else.
2. "Service experience" with no styles named. She cannot tell whether you have carried three plates or poured champagne on a swim platform.
3. Hotel years buried under "other employment" as a title and a date. Four years of fine dining is the strongest thing on a junior interior CV. Give it room.

Then the universal ones: typos (in one captains' survey, spelling and grammar accounted for the largest single share of rejections), years-only dates, unexplained gaps, more than two pages, and a CV that never names the role it is for. If you have sent a CV and heard nothing, why yacht CVs get no replies walks through the usual reasons.

References

Three named, most recent first, with phone and email. Chief stews and captains before anyone else, but a restaurant manager or a private family you worked for is a legitimate referee for a green candidate. Never fellow crew, never family. Do not write "available on request": most captains surveyed said they check references, and the faster they can, the more likely the offer.

Sending it

The introduction email is the cover letter. Address the chief stew or captain properly, say which position, give two or three sentences on relevant experience and why this boat, state your location and availability, thank them. Attach the CV as Firstname_Lastname_Stewardess_CV.pdf, under a couple of megabytes, because boats download over satellite. Keep a clean copy on your phone; captains ask for CVs over WhatsApp constantly.

Next step

If your CV is still shaped like a restaurant CV, upload it and it comes back as a yacht stewardess CV: photo placed, personal block filled, certificates with dates, service styles named, two pages, clean A4 PDF. Free, no account needed to start.