From ocean liners to artificial waves, meet the woman taking surf to the ’burbs
She has weathered IVF, heartbreak and the ‘bruise cruise’. Now, armed with fresh capital, Jennifer Vandekreeke is steering her boldest venture yet – landlocked surf parks.
It was the longest flight of Jennifer Vandekreeke’s life.
Not long after her plane bound for Los Angeles took off from Sydney in September 2010, her stomach was in knots and tears were silently streaming down her face.
They didn’t stop for the next 12 hours. Not because she missed home, or even because she was jet-lagged. She was simply overwhelmed – the feeling that comes with the realisation that you are about to leap off a professional cliff without a parachute.
She had just been offered the opportunity to bring the giant American cruise ship operator Carnival Cruise Lines to Australia. A new market, a new country and a new level of responsibility.
“I flew down here and met with some people and sat and thought about it. I was like, ‘I have no idea how to do this’,” she recalls.
“I thought ‘I know marketing, which is a third of the job. But I now have to run a balance sheet. I have to deal with crises. I have to do itinerary planning, revenue management, start negotiating commercial terms and deal with regulators’.”
When she landed back in the US, in a panic she called her boss, who told her to sleep on the fears for 24 hours.
Then came the conversation that changed her life.
She turned to her father, Charles Gilbert Moore the Third, or “Kip”, as everyone called him. He had been a high-flying venture capitalist in New York before pivoting to angel investing in his home state of Maine. He was a man with exacting standards and a bold worldview.
He had always been her hero.
“He’s like, ‘OK Jennifer, I guarantee you have a list of the things you do. What do you have on the top of the list?’,” Vandekreeke recalls her father asking.
“So I said ‘Things I don’t know how to do’. He’s like, ‘I want you to cross those out. I want you to put down things that you will learn’.”
She did just as her father suggested, building a plan and a road map. She set up a weekly call with Carnival’s head of revenue management, then the finance director. She quickly learned on the job.
What started as panic ended in progress and results, a personal MBA delivered in real time.
A few months later, in 2011, with five-year-old twins Chase and Phoebe in tow, Vandekreeke and husband Robin packed up their lives and moved to Sydney to do the job she was offered.
Her husband for so long had been her rock and biggest cheerleader. As a passionate surfer, on Sydney’s beaches he found his own kind of paradise, and the family are now Australian citizens.
Career switch
A year ago, his hobby became the centrepiece of his wife’s professional life when she traded cruise lines for surf parks, becoming CEO of URBNSURF, the Australian firm started in 2012 that operates pools with ocean-like waves for all levels, from beginners to experienced surfers.
Twenty surf parks are operational globally, but URBNSURF is the only company in the world operating two parks in one country after its Sydney location opened last year, adding to its inaugural Melbourne offering.
“The business model for a surf park is very similar to a cruise company,” Vandekreeke says.
“You have a large, capital-expensive asset with relatively low variable costs. So in a business with high operating leverage, success is determined by driving occupancy and rate.
“After visiting the parks and spending time on the website, it was clear there was an opportunity to uplift the business performance by deploying the skills and experience I’d gained in the travel and leisure sector.”
Vandekreeke has now spent more than 20 years living outside of the US, in Italy, France, Colombia and Australia, employed by firms such as Club Med, The Biltmore Hotel, NRMA and Carnival.
“Over the past year at URBNSURF we have transformed the business by applying data analytics, elevating the website, optimising revenue management, upgrading the guest experience and developing a highly targeted digital marketing strategy,” she says.
“Our marketing ROI has more than doubled and key digital performance ratios, such as our look to book performance, are up 33 per cent. Plus I love working for a company that delivers the joy, rush, and thrill of surfing every day.”
Mayflower roots
Vandekreeke’s roots are as deeply planted in US history as the Mayflower itself, literally.
“I’m originally from the northeast of the US, the small coastal state of Maine. The rest of my family still lives there,” she says. “I had 16 ancestors on the Mayflower.”
It was in her homeland that she went through the most difficult personal battle of her life: the journey to motherhood. She endured seven rounds of IVF over five years before eventually falling pregnant with twins. It was physically and emotionally exhausting.
“IVF put an enormous strain on the relationship with my husband,” she says. “I’m a determined person, and I was going to have children, but you still have to keep your relationship intact, support each other, and keep perspective. That is hard when every round of IVF that fails feels like a loss.”
Through it all, a therapist helped her discover one of the most powerful mental frameworks that she still uses today.
“She told me to schedule a time each day to think about all the IVF stuff,” she says. “For me, it was 5pm. Anytime the thoughts came during the day, I’d say, ‘You get to think about this at 5’.
“Within a few days, the thoughts stopped coming during the day. I still use that technique in life. It helps with anxiety, focus and prioritising what truly matters.”
Her twins arrived eight weeks early after 56 hours of labour and an emergency C-section. One was in intensive care for four weeks. The other, five.
Then, a week after they came home, Hurricane Katrina passed directly over their then home in Miami. But the family survived.
She created the “Adventure Club” for her children when she went back to work, a weekly ritual of nature and bonding.
Every Sunday morning the family headed off on an adventure, such as going to the zoo, canoeing or a bike ride. Her father would often join them for the outing or afterwards for doughnuts.
“My dad and I had such fond memories of knowing I was going to have that time with him every week,” she says.
Her children, now 19, are thriving. “They are so strong-willed, so confident and comfortable in who they are,” she says.
“I think as parents our job is just to allow our children to become the people they want to be and support them on that journey.”
Vandekreeke’s father died in January 2015 after a 16-year battle with prostate cancer. He was 71.
Her parents had divorced when she was 13 and, while she lived with her mother growing up when her father went off to New York, they saw each other regularly and remained close.
“We talked every single week. I feel really lucky to have had him for 45 years,” she says.
Asked what she had learned most from him, she recalls a story from when she was seven flying to Florida to see her grandparents. She overheard the flight attendants talking about getting to travel for free.
“I turned to my dad and proudly said, ‘Daddy, I’m going to be a stewardess!’ He just looked at me and said, ‘No, you won’t. You will be a pilot’,” she recalls.
“There weren’t any female commercial flight captains back then. But he had this vision for what I could be, even when society didn’t. Every time I hear a female captain’s voice now, I think of Dad. He believed in me. I carry that belief with me every day.”
By the time Vandekreeke stepped down from running Carnival Cruise Lines Australia after a decade in the role, she had grown the family cruise market substantially and the local business she established had welcomed more than one million guests.
But the journey wasn’t without turbulence. In February 2018, Carnival Australia’s infamous “bruise cruise” garnered worldwide attention when more than 20 members of the same extended family were escorted from the ship mid-voyage following days of fights with security aboard a 10-day South Pacific cruise.
She said the decision to remove the family members was “unprecedented”, and disgruntled passengers were offered a 25 per cent credit. There was subsequent legal action.
“When you are in hospitality, things are going to happen,” she says. “We had a number of incidents in the 10 years that I was running the cruise line here in Australia, and I would always take a step back. Whatever I said publicly and even personally with my team, I wanted to speak in a way that whoever was the victim, their mother or father would be able to hear what I was saying and feel comfortable.”
In her current role, she reveals customers have had medical episodes and even died at URBNSURF’s parks over the past year. “Some of them have not made it. One, last May, was a beautiful, beautiful human being. He loved URBNSURF,” she says. “What I said to everybody at the park was that if you are going to talk about this, I want you to imagine that his wife is standing next to you and can hear everything you say. That is the level of respect that we need to give whenever we are speaking about anybody who has gone through one of those instances.”
Commercial shift
In her first year at URBNSURF, Vandekreeke has shifted the business from a development project to a commercial operation. The company had previously been cash constrained for years, scraping together capital to open the Sydney park, which was then hit by construction cost blowouts and the aftershocks of a La Nina event and the Covid pandemic.
“We are about to close on a $75m recapitalisation of the business with a combination of equity, primarily from existing shareholders, and debt,” she says.
The capital will bolster the balance sheet and lay the groundwork for growth, especially for the 80 investors currently backing URBNSURF, from family offices to high-net-worth individuals. Seven-time world champion surfer Layne Beachley is a director.
A highlight of Vandekreeke’s first year in the job has been seeing female participation at URBNSURF Melbourne grow by 47 per cent since launch. URBNSURF Sydney also hit more than 90 per cent occupancy last summer.
She admits she is “a decidedly mediocre surfer”, adding: “Those who know me well can confirm that I live in a surf-mad household. But I have always been too intimidated to paddle into the line-up.”
Her husband and son now work as surf guides at URBNSURF Sydney on weekends.
Family has and always will remain central in Vandekreeke’s life. She has just returned to the US with her twins to visit her widowed mother.
Her father’s funeral a decade ago was held during the biggest snowstorm Maine had seen in decades, in Portland.
At the service she sang the modern version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, adapted by Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. Then she told the assembled crowd the sacred truth about her father.
“He was my hero, my mentor, and my best friend,” she recalls solemnly of her words that day.
“He just had this rock solid belief in my abilities. He did not get to see me make it to the point where I had the CEO title. But I know he would be so proud.”
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