THE COMPANY
Where it all started
Yacht Hotel was founded by George Rizzo and started operations in august 2008. George Rizzo is Maltese and resident in Taormina since 1983.
He is in his early sixties and has been a keen sailor for close to fifty years. His business and marketing experience, extensive cruising and love for the sea has all come together in one innovative project, a hotel service on the water.
George explains that for a good part of his intensive working life, cruising became more and more restricted to periods of “vacation”, a need to relax, unwind and regenerate oneself.
Yacht Hotel offers a stress-free mooring in an idyllic location, well protected from the prevailing summer winds below the cape of Taormina on the east coast of Sicily. Yacht marinas in the summer holiday period are crowded, hot, stuffy, smelly and swarming with mosquitos.
Anchorages are crowded and leaving your yacht at anchor (often unattended) means that your trip ashore becomes stressful and often shortened by the anxiety of getting back to your boat as soon as possible.
Yacht Hotel was set up to ensure that you relax, unwind and regenerate yourself. A concierge service is there to provide you with all the information you may need as well to assist you in organising your visit to Taormina or exploring Sicily whilst your yacht is safely moored and being looked after by the YH team.
George became more and more conscious of the need to protect and preserve the marine environment and today, Yacht Hotel is actively promoting the protection of the seabed. Mediterranean seagrasses and seaweeds have now regrown within and around the mooring field recreating a unique habitat and shelter for free-swimming animals and non-moving organisms. Seagrasses are known as “the lungs of the sea” because one square meter of seagrass can generate 10 litres of oxygen every day.
Yacht Hotel has applied to the extend mooring field in Taormina in order to provide environment friendly moorings to larger superyachts with the objective of discouraging anchoring which continues to destroy the seabed.
The YH team is grateful for the support of so many clients and is committed to continue investing in a better environment for generations to come, thank you.