Yacht charter concierge, starting with the berth calendar

Members usually arrive with a boat in mind, found in a brochure or on someone else's week. The boat is rarely the hard part. What a yacht charter concierge is really working on is whether that hull is already committed, where it sits when you want it, and whether the ports on your list can take that length on those dates. Availability is confirmed per request.

Charter is sold by the week, not by the night. Seven nights is the working unit in the main seasons, and shorter periods are quoted as exceptions. The advertised rate is the base fee. It buys the yacht, the crew and the insurance on the vessel. It does not buy fuel, food, wine, dockage, port fees or the tender running back and forth to shore. Those sit somewhere else, and that is where most surprises live.

You send the shape of the trip: dates, how many aboard, roughly where. What comes back is a shortlist of hulls that are free on the day we ask, a plain reading of the total cost rather than the headline one, and what the captain says about the route before anything is signed. Aervante coordinates. The owner, the broker and the crew supply and bill. Yacht sourcing sits on Reserve and Private Client.

APA is a float, not a fee

The advance provisioning allowance is the running account for the week. It is set in the contract as a percentage of the base fee, transferred before you board, and administered by the captain rather than by you. Fuel, berthing, provisioning, laundry, port clearance and anything else the boat consumes is drawn against it.

Two things follow. Long passages at speed burn the account faster than a week spent at anchor, and the captain may ask for a top-up mid-charter, which is normal, not a renegotiation. At the end the spend is accounted for with receipts and the unspent balance returned; standard contracts say so, and we read yours to check. We ask about the likely burn rate before you sign, because the honest answer changes the itinerary more often than it changes the price.

Crew gratuity is separate, and customary rather than contractual. It is handed to the captain at the end to divide across the crew, and it is discretionary in the real sense: the number moves with the week you had. We will tell you what is normal for that size of boat and that cruising ground before you board, so it is not a question you are solving on the last morning.

What a yacht charter concierge negotiates, and with whom

The broker sells the yacht. The captain runs the week. Those are two different conversations, and the second one decides what your days actually look like.

So the preference sheet goes in early and it goes in specific. Cabins and who is in them. Diets and allergies. How late the galley stays open. Then the route is tested against the person who has to drive it. Is that overnight passage realistic in August, or does it cost you a day. Can the tender reach that beach at low water. Which anchorages are comfortable when the meltemi is up. Those answers come before contracts, and they are worth more than another set of photographs.

Routing and safety remain the captain's call once you are aboard. That is not a formality. It is the reason we ask which parts of the plan you would defend and which you would swap, before there is any weather to argue about.

Berths are the constraint nobody quotes for

In high season the limiting factor is not the yacht. It is where a yacht of that length can tie up on a Friday night in the ports you want. Berths for larger boats in the busy marinas are held long in advance, and in a race week or a boat show they are gone before the charter is booked.

There are two honest ways through. Request berths as part of the charter negotiation rather than after it, and design the week around the nights you have a berth for. Or plan to anchor out and use the tender, which is often the better week and usually the cheaper one. Both need deciding early, because a berth refused in June cannot be fixed in July.

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