Charter Utilisation

The Number the Charter Industry Publishes Least Willingly

Rate cards are public. Brokerage listings carry a price per week for every week of the year. Operator programmes publish percentages of vessel value. None of these is utilisation, and utilisation is the variable that decides whether any of the rest matters.

The reason is straightforward. A rate card is a marketing asset and a booking sheet is a performance record. Publishing the first costs nothing and publishing the second exposes the operator to comparison.

Part one of this series set out what a rate card actually contains, and part two measured how far season and location move it. This part supplies the multiplier.

What the Measured Figure Actually Is

Yacht-Rent computes a booking rate from its own live inventory, restricted to vessels whose booking lists were updated within the previous seven days. For the 2026 season that sample is 7,843 vessels, and the average booking rate is 40.78 per cent of the weeks in the year, which the platform states as 20.8 weeks.1

That is a higher number than most charter underwriting assumes. It is also, as the next two sections show, a number that needs two adjustments before it can be used.

The first adjustment is that the sample is restricted to vessels with live booking lists. A boat whose owner does not maintain a booking sheet, which is disproportionately a boat that is not being chartered hard, is excluded by construction.

The Spread Between Markets Is Six Weeks

Utilisation varies far less by market than price does. Greece, the best of the seven, books 46.32 per cent of the year. Italy, the worst, books 33.76 per cent. That is a spread of 12.56 percentage points, or about six and a half booked weeks.1

Set that against the price table in part two, where the gap between the cheapest and most expensive market was roughly a factor of two. Utilisation is the more stable variable across geography, and price is the more volatile one. Underwriting that treats geography as a utilisation lever is solving the wrong problem.

There is one exception worth naming. The Caribbean books 45.86 per cent at an average advertised price of 8,470 euro a week, the highest price in the sample. High rate and high utilisation together is the combination that does not appear anywhere else in the table.

The Spread Across the Year Is Eight Times That

Across the whole 7,843 vessel sample, the best week of 2026 booked 78.77 per cent of the fleet, in the week beginning 12 September. The worst booked 10.62 per cent, in the week beginning 19 December.1

Inside individual markets the extremes are sharper still. Greece reached 93.8 per cent in its best week and fell to 6.15 per cent in its worst. France fell to 0.6 per cent, and Turkey to 0.41 per cent, which is a fleet that is effectively closed.

So the variance that matters is not between markets, where the spread is six weeks, but within the year, where a fleet goes from nearly full to nearly empty. Combined with part two's finding that the trough weeks are also the cheapest weeks, the two effects compound: the weeks that fail to sell are the weeks that were worth least anyway, and the weeks that sell are the weeks that were worth most.

That compounding is why a simple average rate multiplied by a simple average utilisation understates a well run vessel and overstates a badly run one, in both cases by more than either error alone.

The Caveat the Source Publishes Against Itself

Yacht-Rent states the limitation directly on the same page as the data. Minor inconsistencies can occur at the ends of the seasons during boat maintenance, because some boat owners mark those periods as reserved by guests, which increases the booking rate.1

That is an unusually honest disclosure and it should be taken seriously rather than noted and discarded. Maintenance blocks fall precisely in the shoulder weeks, which is where the measured booking rate is most sensitive, and they are indistinguishable in the data from a genuine booking.

The correct treatment is to read 40.78 per cent as a ceiling rather than a central estimate. A conservative underwriting case would sit several weeks below it, and any specific vessel's true figure can only come from that vessel's own booking record.

A Year Round Base Reads Differently

Charter data from roughly 100 vessels in the Seychelles showed a 48.2 per cent average annual booking rate, equivalent to 24.6 weeks, at an average 9,021 euro a week, with four cabin vessels at 55.8 per cent and peak season rates at 78 per cent. That analysis, and the market context around it, is set out in the yield on cost note on the catamaran correction.

Two things stand out against the Mediterranean table. The 48.2 per cent figure is above every market in the seven market sample, including Greece. And the 9,021 euro average week is above every market including the Caribbean.

The same caveats apply, and one extra. That sample is roughly one seventy fifth the size of the Yacht-Rent sample, drawn from a single market, and a hundred vessel sample carries wide error bars. It is a data point rather than a series.

Twenty Booked Weeks Against Nineteen Private Days

The most useful comparison for anyone weighing a charter placement against private ownership is not between two charter programmes. It is between a chartered week and an unchartered one.

The United States Coast Guard's 2018 National Recreational Boating Safety Survey found that across all owned boats the average was 19 days on the water in a year, made up of 29 days for motorised boats and 12 for human powered ones. The ownership series works through what that does to the cost of a day aboard in yacht cost per day of use.

Twenty booked weeks is roughly 140 days of vessel use against a private benchmark of 19. That gap is the entire argument for commercial placement, and it is an argument about asset utilisation rather than about yield. The cost of owning a yacht does not change when a boat sits still; only the denominator does.

The Two Questions to Ask an Operator

Everything above is market data, and market data cannot underwrite a specific vessel. Two questions convert it into something that can.

The first is how many weeks this vessel, at this base, sold in each of the last three seasons, stated as weeks rather than as a percentage. The second is what the realised average rate was across those weeks, net of commission, rather than the advertised rate. Part one explained why commission is deducted before the owner is paid and part four of this series takes the operator split apart.

An operator who answers both in writing has given you the two inputs that decide the revenue line. One who answers with a percentage of vessel value has answered a different question, which is the distinction the yacht ownership programs page draws out, and which also shapes how to read a yacht management company proposal.

Where This Analysis Is Weakest

The sample is one platform's inventory, weighted heavily towards Mediterranean bareboat charter. Croatia and Greece together supply 5,260 of the 7,843 vessels. Crewed charter, superyacht charter and owner programmes with contracted usage are not represented.

The booking rate is measured against all 52 weeks of the year, including weeks in which a vessel is hauled out and genuinely unavailable. A rate measured against available weeks rather than calendar weeks would be higher and would mean something different.

The maintenance-block distortion the source itself flags is not quantified anywhere, so the size of the overstatement is unknown. That is a real limitation and it cannot be corrected from published data.

None of these figures is a return, targeted or otherwise, and none describes any particular fund or programme. Revenue is not income until commission, the operator's share and the fixed cost stack have been taken out, which is where the rest of this series goes. The pillar page on yacht charter investment returns collects the whole walk, and is a yacht a good investment states where it lands.