I learned an interesting factoid today.

Mickey Arinson, the man who owns and runs Carnival Cruise Corp. (the biggest cruise ship company in the world) owns his own yacht. Even though he owns several fleets of cruise ships, he chooses a private yacht when he wants a truly relaxing vacation at sea.

At least now we know where he and the rest of the cruise ship industry get all their ideas for marketing campaigns that show secluded harbors, personalized service, uncrowded dining rooms, happy well-paid crew members…

I’m in Fort Lauderdale this week, scouting new yachts and crew for CharterWave members, all as part of the city’s massive annual boat show. I found myself this afternoon in the offices of Ocean Independence, chatting with the company’s USA point person, Ray “Rags” Weldon, when the owner of an 84-foot motoryacht wandered in the front door.

Mr. Yacht Owner had chartered several yachts over the years from Rags, and eventually had gone on to buy a boat of his own. He’s spent the past couple of summers cruising around Alaska, showing his friends all the quiet nooks and coves that–as he put it– the cruise ships are too big to enter. When I introduced myself, he quickly pulled out a photograph of his beautiful yacht. “I have something I’d like to show you,” he said, like a man who’d stolen a secret file from a government agency.

Mr. Yacht Owner then spent five or ten minutes explaining all the improvements he’d made to his yacht to improve what he’d dubbed its Recreation Usability Index. “The RUI,” he explained, “is a term I came up with to define how usable any guest space is on the boat.”

For instance, he’d enclosed, heated, and air conditioned his yacht’s top deck pilothouse area, making it usable in sun or rain, heat or cold. That’s a high RUI. He’d also added a UV-resistant sunshade to the yacht’s aft deck, giving that space a medium RUI (but a rating higher than most other aft decks, where you’re not always quite as protected from skin cancer-causing rays).

What a funny thing, I thought, this yacht owner running around trying to make his yacht more friendly for recreational purposes. And the really neat thing is, his boat isn’t even available for charter. It’s just something he figured out about boats after all his own years of trying to select the most recreation-friendly charter yachts of his own.

So there you have it: When you’re comparing charter yachts, keep in mind how their guest areas rate in terms of Mr. Yacht Owner’s RUI philosophy. You just might be happier in the long run, no matter what kind of weather you encounter during your charter.

My husband and I had dinner recently with a friend of his from the golf business and the golfer’s wife. It seems my hubby spent half the day on the course telling the golfer all about CharterWave and my new book about cruising vacations, and so when I joined the group for dinner later in the day, I felt it only appropriate to offer a signed copy as a gift. The golfer looked it up and down, then quickly handed it over to his wife.

She looked at the book’s cover, whose title asks, “Why book a cabin? Have the Whole Boat.” Then she read the book’s back-cover copy, which explains that readers probably have never heard of charter because travel agents make such good money pushing cruise-ship cabins instead. Reputable charter brokers, not travel agents, are the key to finding the cruising vacation of your dreams.

This is when my brain wires fired and pulled out the long-forgotten information that the golfer’s wife is a travel agent. I suppose the memory was triggered by the look of mild indignation on her face.

I’m sure you can imagine the look of utter discomfort that crossed mine. We hadn’t even ordered the hors d’oeuvres yet.

A lovely dinner followed, but only after a few minutes of her explaining how cruise ships are wonderful places, which she said she knew because they gave her so many free trips. She even started to explain how she thought they were better than private yachts, right up until I asked her if she’d ever been onboard one. (Of course not. No freebie junket had been offered to her.)

She also made clear that she, too, can book yacht charters–by picking up the phone and calling a charter broker on behalf of her clients. Why, I asked myself, would anybody want to put such a clueless middleman between themselves and the person who is actually coordinating their cruising vacation?

As you might imagine, this conversation was not going to end well, so the two of us eventually changed the subject by listening to our golfer husbands recount the minute details of every last hole they’d played on the course that day.

But the point had been made, and it just may be the sharp one to the heart that the mammoth, collusive cruise-ship-travel-agency beast has needed for some time.

You really can Have the Whole Boat. You just have to leave your travel agent behind and learn the basics of a better cruising vacation by joining the CharterWave community.