In my wanderings around the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show today, I saw three or four giant advertisements for fractional ownership programs. The idea is similar to timeshares: You buy a share of an entire boat, to use during the fraction of the year when you have vacation days to go cruising.

I checked out the prices, and I have to say that I still can’t understand why anyone would choose fractional ownership over chartering those same few weeks each year. By my math, fractional ownership costs more than chartering, involves more headaches than chartering (like dealing with maintenance issues), and forces you to go back to the same cruising area (wherever the boat is) again and again and again. Yes, you do own a share of the boat, but they depreciate over time just like cars, and I simply don’t think the small refund is worth the added aggravation.

For my money, I’d much rather charter a few different charter yachts in a few different locations whenever I had a few vacation weeks to enjoy, then walk away at the end of each cruise without a single responsibility in the world.

I suppose that’s why I’ll never be a boat owner. I just can’t see passing up all the terrific charter opportunities out there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Boating Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.