The Moorings publishes a single number on its ownership page: a monthly payment equivalent to 8 percent of the yacht's purchase price, described as "a figure guaranteed by contract and unaffected by your boat's actual activity". Sunsail, its sister brand, publishes the same headline figure. Dream Yacht's Performance Program publishes a different kind of number entirely, namely 70 percent of gross rental revenue for each charter booking, after annual maintenance and operational expenses. Three published figures, three incompatible meanings, and no operator anywhere in the market publishing the one statistic that would let a buyer reconcile them: how many weeks a year the boat actually charters.
Three Contract Shapes
Almost every charter management programme sold to private buyers is a variation on one of three contract shapes, and the differences between them are not differences of generosity. They are differences in who absorbs the variance in charter revenue. Reading the published terms of the largest operators side by side makes the taxonomy obvious, and it makes the marketing far less impressive.
The first shape is the fixed-payment programme. The Moorings operates its yacht at one of its bases for five to six years and pays the owner a monthly amount equivalent to 8 percent of the purchase price annually, explicitly decoupled from the vessel's charter activity. Sunsail's equivalent page describes "a steady 8% annual return - guaranteed", paid monthly regardless of the yacht's charter activity, over five to six sailing seasons. In both cases the operator covers maintenance, dockage, insurance and repairs, and the owner receives up to twelve weeks of annual use on sister ships across the two fleets. At the end of the term the owner may keep the boat, trade it in, or sell it through the operator's brokerage at a standard 10 percent commission.
The second shape is the fixed-term programme with a variable coupon. Dream Yacht's Guarantee Program runs for a fixed 66 months and pays what the operator calls a guaranteed annual income "determined by choice of yacht, destination, and program duration". Navigare's Complete programme offers a guaranteed annual income for up to six seasons with operating costs borne by Navigare, and the company states plainly on its programmes page that the "annual income percentage varies depending on the type of yacht and the destination where you place your yacht". This is not the same product as an 8 percent coupon. It is a coupon whose level is set at underwriting, per hull and per base, and neither operator publishes a rate card.
| Contract shape | Named programmes | What the owner is paid | Who absorbs revenue variance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed payment | The Moorings, Sunsail | 8 per cent of purchase price a year, paid monthly, decoupled from charter activity, over five to six seasons | The operator |
| Fixed term, variable coupon | Dream Yacht Guarantee, Navigare Complete | An annual income set at underwriting by yacht, destination and duration, with no published rate card | The operator, at a rate it sets per hull |
| Revenue share | Dream Yacht Performance, TMM | 70 per cent of gross rental revenue per booking after maintenance and operational expenses; TMM instead takes 25 per cent commission | The owner |
The third shape is the revenue share, and it is the one that most resembles an operating business. Dream Yacht's Performance Program pays the owner 70 percent of the gross rental revenue for each charter booking, after annual maintenance and operational expenses. Navigare's Ultimate programme pays a variable return for up to seven seasons with operational costs covered by the owner, and offers unlimited owner sailing in exchange. TMM Yacht Charters, in the British Virgin Islands, takes a 25 percent commission on charters it or its agents book, leaves owner-booked charters non-commissionable, imposes no cap on owner use, and passes essentially the entire operating cost base to the owner.
The pattern is consistent. Where the operator bears the operating costs, the owner receives a capped payment. Where the owner bears the operating costs, the payment is uncapped and unpredictable. There is no programme in the market where the owner keeps the upside and the operator keeps the downside, which is exactly what one would expect from a functioning market and exactly what the marketing tends to obscure.
Where The Risk Actually Sits
A fixed-payment programme is best understood not as a yield but as an insurance contract embedded in a purchase. The operator sells the buyer a boat, then buys back the revenue variance on that boat for the term of the agreement. The price of that insurance is the difference between what the vessel would have earned on a revenue share and what the fixed payment delivers. Neither number is disclosed, so the premium is unobservable, which is precisely why the structure is popular with sellers.
That does not make it a bad deal. For a buyer whose principal objective is predictable cash flow to service a loan, transferring utilisation risk to a counterparty with a thousand-vessel fleet and sixty bases is a rational trade. Sunsail states directly that the monthly payment is designed to cover the owner's loan repayment, and both Moorings and Sunsail accept 20 percent down payments with financing for the balance. The structure exists because it solves a real financing problem. The question is not whether the insurance has value but whether it is priced fairly, and the buyer has no way to check.
The residual risk that a fixed payment does not transfer is counterparty risk, and it is the risk most often ignored at the point of sale. A contractual commitment to pay 8 percent of purchase price annually for six years is worth exactly as much as the balance sheet standing behind it. It is a senior unsecured claim on a charter operator, in a business with high fixed costs, seasonal cash flows and concentrated geographic exposure. In a severe downturn the operator does not have a hedge against a fleet-wide collapse in bookings; it simply owes the money. A buyer performing serious diligence would treat the payment stream as corporate credit and price it accordingly, which almost none do.
Revenue share programmes invert the exposure completely. The owner takes utilisation risk, weather risk, pricing risk, damage-related downtime and the full operating cost base, and receives whatever is left. That is a genuine operating business with a single asset, run by a manager whose incentive is to maximise fleet revenue rather than the revenue of any particular hull. The dispersion of outcomes is wide, and the manager's allocation decisions between similar boats in the same base materially affect where any individual owner lands within it.
The most useful diagnostic is therefore not the headline percentage but the answer to a single question: in the year the base has a bad season, whose problem is it? Under a Moorings or Sunsail contract it is the operator's problem. Under a Dream Yacht Performance, Navigare Ultimate or TMM contract it is the owner's. Every other difference between these programmes is secondary to that one.
What The Owner Still Pays
The phrase "all-inclusive" appears throughout this market, and it is worth reading the operators' own definitions of it rather than the summaries produced by brokers. Sunsail's programme page is admirably explicit. Under its Guaranteed Income programme the company pays for routine berthing, scheduled maintenance, standard repairs, insurance and the everyday operating expenses required to keep the yacht in charter service. It then lists, on the same page, what the owner still pays: financing and interest costs, vessel registration or documentation, travel to and from the bases, and, during owner trips, fuel, provisioning, optional extras, turnaround or cleaning fees where charged, and any hired skipper or crew.
Each of those exclusions is small on its own. Together they change the arithmetic of the twelve-week owner allowance considerably. The allowance covers the charter value of the yacht itself and nothing else, which means the marginal cost of a week aboard is the cost of flights for the party, a turnaround fee, fuel, provisioning and, for most buyers of a fifty-foot catamaran, a skipper. An owner who values the allowance at the yacht's published weekly charter rate is overstating the benefit by whatever those items cost, and on a Caribbean itinerary they are not trivial.
On the revenue share side the disclosure is better, because it has to be. TMM publishes what is probably the most complete owner-cost schedule available anywhere in the bareboat market, and the numbers are instructive precisely because they are so ordinary. Turnaround is charged per charter, at 580 US dollars for a monohull without air conditioning, rising to 690 for catamarans over 42 feet with air conditioning. Boatwatching runs 250 US dollars a month, credited back for days the vessel is away from the dock. Insurance under TMM's fleet policy runs at approximately 2.5 percent of hull value per year. Guest wi-fi costs 130 US dollars a month. The British Virgin Islands charge the owner separately for an annual home-port exemption certificate and a commercial vessel licence.
Consider what 2.5 percent of hull value means against a headline yield. On a vessel bought at €700,000, insurance alone consumes €17,500 a year. Turnaround at the top of TMM's published range, across a plausible fifteen charters, is another sum in the same order. Dockage, haul-out, antifouling, sails, canvas, electronics, tender and outboard servicing, and the labour to fit any of it, sit on top. This is why the broker community's standard warning about revenue splits is the correct one, and it is worth quoting a firm that sells these programmes for a living rather than paraphrasing it.
The Catamaran Guru, a dealer and advisory business in this exact market, describes the guaranteed programmes offered by the larger companies and then notes what happens to the boat and the balance at the end of them. Its estimate is that an owner in a five-year guaranteed programme will have received roughly 45 percent of the purchase price in monthly payments and will recoup around 65 percent of the original value on sale. That is a broker's estimate rather than an audited figure and should be read as such, but it is the only quantified end-to-end account of the trade published by anyone with direct commercial knowledge, and it is notably less exciting than an 8 percent headline suggests.
The Utilisation Assumption
The single largest evidential gap in this market is that no major operator publishes a fleet utilisation rate or an average number of chartered weeks per vessel per year. Not one. Buyers are asked to evaluate a revenue share on a boat whose expected revenue has never been disclosed by the party that controls the bookings, and the absence is uniform enough across the industry to be a convention rather than an oversight.
What operators do publish are three different quantities that are routinely conflated in conversation. The first is the owner-use allowance, which Moorings, Sunsail, Dream Yacht and Navigare all put at up to twelve weeks a year. The second is the minimum availability requirement, which is the only hard operator commitment in the set: Dream Yacht requires that a boat in the Performance Program be available for charter operations for at least seven weeks per year, and Navigare applies the same seven-week floor across its programmes. The third is the number of weeks the boat actually charters, which nobody publishes at all.
A floor of seven weeks is a legal minimum for the owner's availability obligation. It is not a forecast, and treating it as one produces revenue expectations that are wrong by a factor of two or three in either direction. The nearest thing to an independent benchmark comes from the editorial side of the industry. Yachtpedia's fleet management guide sets out the standard operator key performance indicators and gives a target utilisation band of 65 to 80 percent of available days, noting that a yacht is typically available for around 40 to 44 weeks a year after maintenance, repositioning and owner use, that a fleet at 70 percent utilisation is performing well, that above 75 percent is strong, and that below 55 percent signals structural problems with pricing, marketing or vessel condition.
Those percentages are of available days rather than calendar days, which is where most owner arithmetic goes wrong. Sixty-five percent of a 42-week availability window is roughly 27 chartered weeks. That is a plausible target for a well-marketed vessel in a mature base and a very demanding one for a new listing in a crowded fleet. The same guide puts average charter duration at seven to ten days and turnaround at 24 to 48 hours, which is the mechanical constraint that stops utilisation from approaching 100 percent even in a fully booked season.
The gap between the twelve-week allowance and its practical use is similarly wide. The Catamaran Guru's assessment is that although twelve weeks are offered, most owners can use on average only about five weeks a year, and three to six weeks for a single owner without a partnership arrangement. A buyer who values the allowance at twelve weeks and the revenue at the seven-week floor has managed to get both numbers wrong in the direction that flatters the purchase. Anyone underwriting one of these programmes should ask for the actual booked weeks per vessel at their intended base for the last three seasons, in writing, and should treat a refusal as information.
Marketed On Gross, Judged On Net
Almost every case of owner disappointment in this market has the same origin. The programme is marketed on a gross figure and lived on a net one, and the two are separated by a schedule of deductions that is rarely discussed at the point of sale because it does not fit on a slide. A split ratio is memorable. A deduction schedule is not, and the deduction schedule is what determines the outcome.
The arithmetic is easy to demonstrate and unpleasant to confront. An 80/20 split from which the manager first deducts booking commissions, turnaround, dockage, insurance, maintenance and a fleet marketing levy can leave the owner with less cash than a 60/40 split where fewer items are charged back. Dream Yacht's Performance Program is unusually clear on this point, stating on its own page that the 70 percent is of gross rental revenue for each charter booking, after annual maintenance and operational expenses. That is a materially different product from 70 percent of gross, and the fact that the operator says so plainly is to its credit. A buyer comparing it against a competitor advertising a higher split without that qualifier is not comparing like with like, and the higher number may well be the worse deal.
Against this sits an argument that has become much harder to answer over the last eighteen months, and it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than gestured at. The real risk-free return is no longer zero. On 23 April 2026 the ten-year US Treasury inflation-indexed yield stood at 1.92 percent, with the thirty-year at 2.65 percent, according to the Treasury's own daily real yield curve. An investor can therefore contract for a liquid, daily-priced, inflation-protected real return approaching 2 percent, with no crew, no berth, no insurance placement, no depreciation and no counterparty concentration. Every yacht programme in this article must clear that hurdle after operating costs, after residual value loss, and after the illiquidity of a six-year lock-up, before it is interesting at all. In 2021 that hurdle was negative. It is not negative now, and no amount of structural cleverness makes it go away.
The cost side of the hurdle is larger than most models allow for. Yachtpedia's key performance indicator set puts a normal maintenance cost ratio at 3 to 5 percent of vessel value annually, before insurance, before berthing and before turnaround. Add TMM's published fleet insurance rate of approximately 2.5 percent of hull value and the recurring cost base alone is comfortably into high single digits as a percentage of the asset, on a vessel that is also depreciating. A gross charter yield that sounds impressive next to a bond coupon is being compared against the wrong benchmark. It should be compared against a bond coupon plus the operating cost ratio plus the annual decline in residual value, and on that comparison a great many programmes are marginal.
None of this makes charter revenue illusory. It is a real income stream produced by a real business with real customers, and a well-run vessel in a mature base at the top of Yachtpedia's 65 to 80 percent utilisation band earns a genuine and substantial return on the operator's cost base. The honest conclusion is narrower and more useful than either the promotional or the dismissive version. Charter revenue is real, the operating cost base set against it is large, and the difference between a good outcome and a poor one is determined almost entirely by utilisation and cost discipline, neither of which a single-vessel owner controls and neither of which any operator in this market discloses in advance.
The Structural Alternative
Everything above points to the same structural conclusion. The economics of charter are fleet economics. Turnaround cost per charter, insurance rate per hull, berth rate per metre, spares inventory, crew utilisation, marketing reach and booking conversion all improve with scale, and every one of them is charged to the single-boat owner at a price set by someone whose interests are not aligned with his. The individual owner is buying a retail position in a wholesale business, and the difference between the two prices is the operator's margin.
The counter-consideration is equally real, and it is a genuine argument against scale rather than for it. A larger fleet at a given base means more identical hulls competing for the same bookings, and the resulting dispersion falls unevenly. Yachtpedia's guide makes the point directly: utilisation is not evenly distributed within a fleet, and a well-known vessel might book 28 weeks in a year while a lesser-known sister ship in the same fleet books 14. The manager decides which boats are marketed hardest and which enquiries are converted onto which hull. For the individual owner that is an allocation risk with no disclosure and no recourse, and it is the reason a bigger fleet is not automatically a better fleet for any particular boat in it.
That tension is not resolvable inside a single-vessel ownership structure, because the owner sits on the wrong side of both effects. He pays retail for services and competes with the fleet for bookings, while having no claim on the fleet's aggregate performance. Resolving it requires changing what the investor owns, from one hull to a proportionate interest in the economics of a managed fleet, so that dispersion between the 28-week boat and the 14-week boat nets out inside the portfolio rather than landing on one balance sheet.
That is the structure we operate. HelmShare Prime Fund, L.P. is a Cayman Islands Exempted Limited Partnership whose general partner and investment manager is HelmShare LLC (DIFC), regulated by the DFSA as a Category 3C firm. Investors hold limited partnership interests in a fund that holds vessels, rather than title to a single boat. The fund's charter arrangements include a contractual yield commitment from its operating partner to the Fund, which is a different thing from a promise to investors, and returns to limited partners are targeted rather than promised. Interests are offered under Regulation S outside the United States to professional, qualified and high net worth investors. Capital is at risk, and the same hurdle applies to this structure as to every other one discussed above.
The open question, which no structure disposes of, is whether charter economics in aggregate will clear a real risk-free rate approaching 2 percent over a six-year holding period after operating costs and residual value decline. That is an underwriting judgement rather than a matter of contract design, and no fund structure and no contract shape can answer it in advance. What can be asked in advance is the booked weeks per vessel, per base, for the last three seasons. The answer to that question is worth more than every published headline percentage in this market combined, which is presumably why it is the one number nobody publishes.
References
1 The Moorings. "Guaranteed Income | The Moorings Yacht Ownership." Yacht Ownership Program, accessed April 2026.
https://www.mooringsyachtownership.com/yacht-ownership-program/guaranteed-income
2 Sunsail. "Guaranteed Income | Sunsail Yacht Ownership." Yacht Ownership Program, accessed April 2026.
https://www.sunsailyachtownership.com/yacht-ownership-program/guaranteed-income
3 Dream Yacht Sales. "The Guarantee Program." Yacht ownership programmes, accessed April 2026.
https://www.dreamyachtsales.com/ownership-program/the-guarantee-program/
4 Dream Yacht Sales. "The Performance Program." Yacht ownership programmes, accessed April 2026.
https://www.dreamyachtsales.com/ownership-program/the-worldwide-performance-program/
5 Navigare Yachting. "Yacht Ownership Programs and Charter Management Services." Programme comparison page, accessed April 2026.
https://www.navigare-yachting-sales.com/management-programs/
6 TMM Yacht Charters. "Yacht Management Program." Published owner cost schedule, British Virgin Islands, accessed April 2026.
https://sailtmm.com/management-program
7 The Catamaran Gurus. "Charter Yacht Management Programs: Do The Numbers Work?" Dealer and advisory commentary, accessed April 2026.
https://catamaranguru.com/charter-management/charter-yacht-management-programs-do-the-numbers-work/
8 Yachtpedia Editorial Team. "Charter Fleet Management: Maximise Bookings and Minimise Downtime." Charter operations reference, accessed April 2026.
https://yachtpedia.org/articles/charter-fleet-management/
9 United States Department of the Treasury. "Daily Treasury Par Real Yield Curve Rates, 2026." Resource Center, data for 23 April 2026.
https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_treasury_real_yield_curve
Interested in yacht investments?
HelmShare Prime Fund, L.P. offers professional, qualified and high net worth investors outside the United States a limited partnership interest in a professionally managed charter fleet rather than title to a single hull. Investor materials, including the fleet's utilisation record, are available on request.