How to choose a yacht management company

A yacht management company runs a vessel on the owner's behalf, covering some or all of crew employment, technical maintenance and refit supervision, insurance placement, flag and class compliance, accounting and budgeting, and, where the yacht is chartered, marketing and booking.

Two quite different businesses use the same name. Full-service management, common at superyacht scale, is an outsourced operations department paid a fee to run your asset. Charter management, common in the 40 to 60 foot production segment, is a commercial partner that sells the vessel to charterers and shares the revenue. The first is a cost centre you control. The second is a revenue arrangement in which the counterparty sets most of the terms.

Charter-focused companies publish a basis rather than a price, and the bases are not comparable. Read the third column before the second.

The reason to distrust a percentage comparison comes from inside the industry. Catamaran Guru, a broker that sells these programmes, states that the income split in a performance programme is often very misleading and used as a marketing tool, that only the bottom line is relevant, and that what the owner is charged for after the split is what truly determines it. An 80/20 split can pay less than a 60/40 because of loaded costs.

The clearest published owner-cost schedule in the market belongs to TMM, and it is worth reading as a template for what to ask any company to disclose in writing.

Even in an all-inclusive guaranteed programme the owner keeps a list. Sunsail publishes its own: financing and interest, vessel registration and documentation, travel to the base, and during owner trips fuel, provisioning, optional extras, turnaround and cleaning fees, and any hired skipper or crew.

1. What is deducted before my share is calculated?

Some companies take booking commission off the top before the split, others pass it to the owner in full. Ask for a worked example on a real booking, not a percentage.

2. What is your actual fleet utilisation?

No operator publishes a bareboat fleet utilisation rate or an average charter-weeks-per-year figure on any public page. The only hard published commitment anywhere is a seven week minimum availability floor at Navigare and Dream Yacht, which is a floor and not an average. Yachtpedia, an editorial rather than operator source, gives a working band of 65 to 80 percent utilisation, with below 55 percent signalling structural problems. Ask for the number. A company that will not give it either does not measure it or does not like it.

3. What happens at the end?

The broker's own framing is the sharpest available: this is the element not often highlighted when you are speaking with the salesperson. Does the vessel go into a second tier fleet or get sold, is there a good second hand market for that particular model, and how much will you still owe? An ex-charter catamaran is worth roughly 60 to 65 percent of original value after five years on that broker's estimate, or around 50 percent on the independent estimate published by Practical Sailor.

4. How big is the fleet in my base?

Scale helps distribution and hurts occupancy at the same time, because sisterships in one base compete for the same charterers. Barefoot Yacht Charters caps its fleet at 25 yachts specifically to avoid diluting owner revenue, reporting gross charter sales up more than 100 percent over six years against fleet growth of no more than 35 percent. That page dates from January 2024 and the figures should be read as historical.

Selecting a management company is a real decision if you already own or intend to own a vessel. If the reason for owning it was the income, the management company is one variable inside a structure that has several others working against you: concentration in a single hull, depreciation you carry alone, and a private resale at the end.

HelmShare Prime Fund, L.P. resolves that differently. It is a Cayman Islands Exempted Limited Partnership holding a fleet operated year round in the Seychelles by charter partner Navigare Yachting. Investors hold limited partnership interests, have no usage rights, and receive quarterly distributions against a targeted 8 percent preferred return over a six year term. The management fee is 2 percent a year on aggregate commitments and carried interest is 20 percent, payable only after return of capital, the preferred return and a general partner catch-up. The 8 percent commitment from Navigare is a contractual commitment to the Fund, not to investors, and applies only to the yacht sleeve. Returns are targeted, not guaranteed, and your capital is at risk.