Charter Return Bridge

The Rate Card and the Revenue Line

The first thing to establish is what the advertised weekly rate is and is not. It is the gross retail price of one boat for one week, paid by a charterer to a charter company. It is not revenue to the owner, it excludes the extras the charterer is separately billed for, and it is not achieved in most weeks of the year. Every step from that number to an owner's net cash is a subtraction.

The published rate cards themselves are consistent enough across the two main cruising grounds to be used as a working base. In the Caribbean, the Moorings 4600 at Tortola runs $10,999 to $25,499 a week for a bareboat charter. In the Mediterranean, Ionian Charter's published 2026 price list for its Greek fleet shows a Lagoon 46, a comparable four-cabin catamaran, at €13,500 in Period A, €11,900 in Period B and €7,900 in Period C. A larger Lagoon 50 runs €17,500, €14,500 and €10,500 across the same three bands, and a Bali 4.6 sits at €16,600, €14,500 and €9,000.

The structure of those three bands matters more than the levels. Ionian's Period A, the top of the rate card, runs from 25 July to 22 August 2026. That is four weeks. Period B, the shoulder, covers 9 May to 25 July and 22 August to 3 October, roughly seventeen weeks. Period C is everything else, some thirty-one weeks of the year priced at a little over half the peak rate. A yacht that fills every Period A week and every Period B week and never charters in Period C has still only sold twenty-one weeks, and the year's revenue is decided almost entirely by how many of the four Period A weeks and the seventeen Period B weeks are actually booked.

A second subtraction hides in the same documents: the gap between what the charterer pays and what the yacht earns. Ionian's obligatory extras include end cleaning running to €450 for catamarans over 45 feet, linen at €15 per person, and a skipper at €200 a day plus food. The Caribbean equivalent is more elaborate: a non-refundable damage waiver of $55 to $125 a day, a refundable deposit of $513 to $2,038, a BVI cruising tax of $4 per person per day, a National Parks Trust permit, and a skipper at $230 a day plus $35 for meals. None of this is revenue to the yacht. It is cost recovery, government levy, or operator margin.

The Moorings' own guidance to charterers is the cleanest statement of how large this wedge is. On its Croatia pages it advises that after flights, transfers, fuel, mooring fees, provisioning, damage waiver and gratuity, a charterer should expect to add roughly 25 to 50 percent to the headline charter price. That is a public admission by the largest operator in the market that the number on the rate card is somewhere between two thirds and four fifths of what a charter week actually costs a customer. It is the first reason why comparing an advertised weekly rate to an owner's capital outlay produces a wildly optimistic yield.

Season, Ground and the Spread

The second determinant of charter revenue is the interaction between a cruising ground's season and the shape of its rate ladder. The Moorings publishes indicative low and high season starting prices for a seven-day charter for two people by destination, last updated in April 2026, and the spreads are extreme. In Croatia the range runs from $1,885 in low season to $16,595 in high season, a spread of roughly nine times on the same product. The Croatian season itself runs from April to October, with the peak concentrated in July and August, which means the boat is not merely cheaper outside those months but very largely unsold.

That pattern repeats with different dates and different amplitudes across the market. Caribbean high season sits in the northern winter and the Mediterranean season sits in the northern summer, which is the one genuinely useful structural fact in charter economics. The two grounds are counter-cyclical. A fleet operating in only one of them is accepting that a significant fraction of the year produces close to nothing, while a fleet with a presence in both can in principle sell into two peaks. The offsetting cost is repositioning, which consumes weeks of the calendar and considerable fuel, and repositioning legs sell at a discount when they sell at all.

The seasonality also explains why utilisation and yield are not interchangeable measures. A yacht that sells twelve weeks a year, of which four are peak, earns very differently from a yacht that sells twelve weeks a year, all of them in Period C. In the Ionian example, twelve Period C weeks on a Lagoon 46 gross €94,800, while four Period A weeks and eight Period B weeks gross €149,200 on the same hull with the same number of charters. Any analysis that reduces a charter yacht's year to a single average weekly rate has discarded the variable that does most of the work.

Weather sets the outer boundary on all of this in the Caribbean, and it sets it in the least convenient way possible. The Atlantic hurricane season overlaps precisely with the Caribbean low season, which means the months when a yacht cannot safely earn are also the months when insurance and lay-up arrangements are most restrictive. A charter operator captures very little benefit from the lay-up credits available to private owners, for the simple reason that its active season and the hurricane season are on opposite sides of the calendar and it needs the boat in the water and in the box during the period a private owner would move it north.

The practical conclusion is that a charter revenue line should be built week by week against a published rate ladder and a specific base, not as an average rate multiplied by a utilisation percentage. The two methods can differ by half again on identical assumptions.

Utilisation, the Number Nobody Publishes

The single largest evidential hole in the public record on charter economics is utilisation. No major bareboat operator publishes a fleet utilisation rate, an average number of charter weeks achieved per yacht per year, or a distribution of outcomes across its fleet. The figures that circulate in brokerage material and on content sites are estimates, and most are not attributed to anything.

What operators do publish is the owner-use allowance, and it is consistently generous. The Moorings' Guaranteed Income programme offers up to twelve weeks of annual use across its own and Sunsail's bases, and rival programmes publish allowances in a similar band. The number is prominent in the marketing because it is the part of the proposition that costs the operator least.

The most useful counterweight to the advertised figure comes from a broker who sells these programmes. Catamaran Guru, examining whether the numbers in charter management programmes work, observes that although twelve weeks are advertised, most owners can in practice use on average only about five weeks a year, and four to six for a single owner rather than a family sharing the allowance. The gap between twelve and five is not an operator's failure. It is the ordinary consequence of school terms, work, flights and the fact that the weeks an owner most wants are the weeks in shortest supply. But it means the advertised usage benefit, which is a large part of how these programmes are sold, is overstated by roughly half in the experience of the people who broker them.

The same asymmetry applies to charter weeks. Published operator commitments are availability floors rather than expected outcomes: a minimum availability floor states how much of the year a yacht will be offered for charter, not how many weeks will sell. Brokerage estimates put a newly listed yacht at four to ten weeks in its first year, rising towards seven to twelve by the third or fourth season as it accumulates repeat business, but those are editorial estimates rather than measured operator data and should be treated as such.

The consequence for an owner's model is severe, because charter revenue is close to linear in weeks sold while the cost base is close to fixed. Dockage, insurance, boatwatching, licences and connectivity are incurred whether the boat sails or not. Only turnaround costs and consumables scale with charters. A yacht that sells sixteen weeks and a yacht that sells eight weeks do not have twice and half the same economics; the first is comfortably above its cost base and the second may be below it, on identical assumptions about rate. Utilisation is not one input among many. In this asset class it is very close to being the whole answer, and it is the input nobody will put in writing.

The Split and the Cost Base

Between gross charter revenue and the owner sits the operator, and the terms on which that split is struck vary more than the headline percentages suggest. Dream Yacht's Performance programme pays the owner 70 percent of gross rental revenue per booking after annual maintenance and operational expenses, over a term of sixty to seventy-two months, with the yacht payable in full to enter. The critical words are "after annual maintenance and operational expenses". This is not 70 percent of gross. It is 70 percent of what is left, which is a materially different arrangement and a materially smaller number.

TMM's published programme takes the opposite approach and charges a 25 percent booking commission on charters booked by TMM or its agents, with owner-sourced charters non-commissionable, while billing the owner directly for the operating costs. Neither structure is inherently better, which is precisely the point a broker makes when warning that the split ratio is the wrong number to look at: what appears to be a better split, such as 80/20, sometimes yields fewer dollars than a 60/40 split because of loaded costs, and only the bottom line is relevant. An owner comparing programmes on the split percentage alone is comparing the least informative figure on the page.

The cost base is where the arithmetic becomes concrete, because TMM publishes its schedule in full. Dockage is billed monthly at $27.00 per foot of length overall for a monohull and $32.50 per foot for a catamaran. On a 46-foot catamaran that is $1,495 a month, or $17,940 a year, before the boat has sailed. Insurance under TMM's fleet policy runs at approximately 2.5 percent of hull value annually. Boatwatching costs $200 to $250 a month. Guest wireless internet costs $130 a month. Charter turnaround, the cleaning and preparation between guests, runs $560 to $690 per charter depending on vessel type. Labour is billed at $25 to $70 an hour depending on the trade.

Then come the government items, small individually and stubborn collectively. A British Virgin Islands home-port exemption certificate costs $950 a year and a commercial recreational vessel licence $800, $1,200 or $1,600 depending on length. A radio licence is $30, a fishing licence $60 to $110, and inspections and the small commercial vessel certificate add several hundred more. Cruising tax runs at $4 per person per day for home-ported vessels against $16 for foreign-flagged ones, which is a meaningful reason to flag correctly.

Assembling only the published, non-discretionary lines for a 46-foot catamaran chartering in the BVI, dockage at $17,940, boatwatching at $3,000, connectivity at $1,560, turnaround at $690 across fourteen charters for $9,660, and the licence stack at roughly $2,600, produces a cost base of approximately $34,800 a year. That figure excludes insurance, which at 2.5 percent of hull value is on its own likely to be the single largest line. It excludes every hour of maintenance labour, every haul-out, every antifoul, every sail, every piece of canvas and every replaced piece of electronics. It excludes the operator's commission entirely. It is, in other words, the floor beneath the floor, and it is already the whole of the revenue from three peak weeks.

The Negative Capital Leg

Everything to this point concerns the income leg. The capital leg of a charter yacht is negative, and any analysis that treats the two separately is not an analysis. A yacht in charter service is being consumed on purpose. It accumulates hours, guests, groundings, salt and sun at a rate no private vessel does, and at the end of the programme it is sold as an ex-charter boat into a market that knows exactly what that means.

The Moorings describes the handover in its own documentation with unusual candour. Yachts are returned to owners "as ex-charter boats that have been maintained to fleet standards, with all the usage expected over a 5 to 6 year charter life", and it notes that many owners then plan a post-handover refit covering cosmetic refresh, new sails and canvas, and electronics upgrades. The refit is presented as normal rather than exceptional. That is the correct framing, and it means the residual value an owner realises is the brokerage price of an ex-charter hull minus the cost of making it presentable.

The magnitude of that depreciation is harder to establish than it should be, and the reader should be told so plainly rather than given a number. No verified institutional yacht value index exists. Yachts do not appear in the luxury asset indices that track cars, watches and wine, and the residual estimates circulating for ex-charter catamarans at five years come from brokers and testing publications that disagree with one another and publish no methodology. What is not in dispute anywhere in the market is the direction and the rough order of magnitude: an ex-charter production catamaran at the end of a five or six year programme is worth a large fraction less than it cost, and the loss is a real cash cost to the owner regardless of whether anyone will put a percentage on it in writing.

Set the two legs against one another using the most transparent programme in the market, and let the reader supply the depreciation assumption themselves. The Moorings' Guaranteed Income structure pays a monthly income equivalent, in its own published wording, to "8% of the purchase price, a figure guaranteed by contract and unaffected by your boat's actual activity", for five to six years, with the operator covering berthing, routine maintenance, insurance, cleaning and standard repairs, and the owner retaining up to twelve weeks of annual use. Over five and a half years that returns roughly 44 percent of the purchase price as income. Whether the arrangement produces a positive financial return therefore reduces to a single question, which is whether the yacht retains more or less than 56 percent of its value over the same period. If it retains less, the programme has returned capital rather than earned a return on it.

That is the honest arithmetic, and it is not a scandal. What such an owner has bought is five to twelve weeks a year of catamaran use for five or six years at a net capital cost that may be close to zero, plus the residual and counterparty risk that goes with it. As a way of consuming yachting it is efficient. As an investment it is a bet on a residual value that nobody in the market will quantify in writing, and an owner who describes the arrangement to themselves as an eight percent yield has silently assumed that the boat does not depreciate at all.

The case where it does not work is easy to construct and is not a pessimistic one. Take utilisation at eight weeks rather than fourteen, three of them peak and five off-peak on the BVI rate card, giving gross charter revenue of about $131,500. Apply a 25 percent booking commission and $98,600 reaches the owner. Deduct the roughly $34,800 of published fixed costs, and $63,800 remains before insurance at 2.5 percent of hull value, before any maintenance labour, before haul-out, and before the annual capital loss. On a hull worth several hundred thousand dollars, insurance and depreciation together can consume all of it and more. This composite is drawn from different operators' published terms for illustration and is not any single programme's economics, though every input is a published figure.

Margin Compression and the Hurdle

Two contemporary facts make the arithmetic harder rather than easier, and both come from the largest charter fleet manager in the market rather than from a critic. IYC, reviewing the first half of 2026, states plainly that "rising operating costs are influencing yacht selection", and that "higher fuel prices, provisions and APA, together with uncertainty stemming from geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, are encouraging some clients to favour shorter, more localized itineraries and yachts with lower weekly charter rates." That is a description of pressure on both the cost base and the achieved rate at the same time, published by a firm with every commercial reason to say something else.

The second fact is structural and larger. IYC counts more than 2,300 yachts over twenty metres available worldwide and puts average annual fleet growth at approximately 6.5 percent, adding in its own words that "this increased supply means more competition." Against that, demand is described as resilient rather than expanding: winter 2025/26 bookings were up around 10 percent year on year, but at the halfway point of 2026 summer bookings stood at roughly 70 percent of the full prior-year summer volume, with clients delaying commitment. Fleet supply compounding at 6.5 percent a year against demand growth of that character is textbook margin compression, and the arithmetic of the preceding sections is more sensitive to a few percent of achieved rate than to almost anything else.

The third fact sits outside the market entirely and is the strongest argument against the whole asset class. The market yield on ten-year inflation-indexed United States Treasury securities was 2.44 percent on 17 August 2026. That is a liquid, daily-priced, inflation-protected real return, available with no crew, no berth, no hurricane season, no manager and no lock-up. Every illiquid real asset must clear it after its full operating cost base, after depreciation and after an illiquidity discount, before it is worth discussing. Five years ago that hurdle was close to zero and a very wide range of private structures cleared it by default. It is not close to zero now, and there is no clean rebuttal to the point.

What structure can do about any of this is narrower than the marketing in this sector implies, and it is worth being precise about the limits. No structure changes the rate card, the season, the weather or the depreciation curve. What a pooled structure can address is the three places where a single owner is most exposed: concentration, in that one hull's engine failure or one base's bad season is an existential event for a single-boat owner and an incident for a fleet; utilisation, in that a fleet with scale can move inventory between grounds and sell across two seasons rather than one; and the fee stack, in that the loaded costs a broker warns about are visible to a manager negotiating across many vessels in a way they are not to an individual buyer comparing brochures.

At HelmShare, that structure is HelmShare Prime Fund, L.P., a Cayman Islands Exempted Limited Partnership issuing limited partnership interests, with HelmShare LLC of the DIFC, regulated by the DFSA as a Category 3C firm, acting as General Partner and Investment Manager. Interests are offered outside the United States under Regulation S to EU and EEA professional investors and to United Kingdom and Gulf high net worth and qualified investors, and United States persons are excluded. Returns are targeted rather than promised and capital is at risk. Where the Fund's charter partner Navigare has committed to an eight percent yield, that is a contractual commitment given to the Fund, not to investors, and it does not convert into any assurance about investor outcomes.

The reason to build the bridge from first principles is that it is the only way to know whether a charter proposition clears a hurdle that is now genuinely demanding. Most published charter yields do not survive the exercise, because they stop at gross revenue or omit the capital leg. A reader who has followed the arithmetic through utilisation, split, cost base and depreciation can ask an operator the two questions that matter, which are how many weeks the vessel actually sold last year and what it is now worth, and notice how rarely either is answered in writing.