Selina Schwarzenbacher’s company offers floating hotel rooms on the Mediterranean.
Selina Schwarzenbacher is 26 years old and CEO of the Salzburg company “EuroYachting”.
She uses this to rent out her own yacht. A week at sea in the catamaran “Aliana” starts with a price in the five-figure range. With five double cabins, a chef, a hostess and even a Playstation on board, the yacht is primarily aimed at families.
Schwarzenbacher shared her income, expenses and earnings with Business Insider – and why she doesn’t have a sailing license herself.
At the age of 26, many young people are just finishing their studies, moving to another shared apartment or thinking about how they will make ends meet. At this age, Selina Schwarzenbacher from Salzburg owns a yacht, a company and spends her summers by the sea. She told Business Insider how she did it, what everyday life on board is like – and how much it all costs.
Sailing and drinking – I want to get away from that image!
Selina Schwarzenbacher is the child of a tourist family: her grandmother has run the “Pension Franziska” all her life, one kilometer from the Salzburg Saalbach-Hinterglemm ski area. The cousins later took over the hotel, expanded it and called it “Grand Pension Franziska”. Outside the winter season, her parents take their daughter on sailing holidays early on, on her uncle’s yacht. “I went sailing for the first time when I was five,” remembers the Salzburg native.
These experiences are said to have ultimately led to studying at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences at the age of 20: “Innovation and Management in Tourism”. “Back then, I had no idea that self-employment would be my future,†says Schwarzenbacher, who is now 26 years old. She is writing her thesis about Generation Z in sailing tourism. A topic that is very niche at this point in time – and will later lead to her business idea.
She wants to bring hotel rooms on the water and finds an investor in the Familux Group
Schwarzenbacher will meet Thomas Stranig in 2021 through a mentoring program. Stranig is an entrepreneur and CEO of BWS Invest GmbH. Selina shares her vision with him: to reinterpret sailing and take the hotel business with families to the sea. He connects her with her future first partner: the Familux Group, more precisely with Florian and Julian Mayer, the managing directors of the Austrian resorts that specialize in family holidays.
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