Entry-Level Lesson
The golf club where my husband is the head PGA professional had its annual member-guest invitational tournament this past weekend. One of the events is a dinner-dance where I get a chance to chat with the club’s members over cocktails.
Typically, it takes about a half-hour for someone to ask me about yacht charter, but this year, one of the guests cornered me inside of 30 seconds. He’d mentioned to my husband earlier in the weekend that he’d had a less-than-ideal charter experience, and my husband had told him I was the woman to help him book better next time.
As it turns out, this man had taken his wife and young children on a skippered bareboat in Belize–a place that looked and sounded exotic in the brochures, but that, as they soon learned, is not exactly a mecca of infrastructure for yachting. The wife hated cruising offshore (she had islands in her mind) and the kids got bored because some of the under way passages were more than four hours long.
“I loved it, but the family didn’t,” the man lamented. “I guess charter isn’t for us.”
“Actually,” I told him, “it’s just that a skippered bareboat in Belize isn’t for you.”
As it turns out, this man had booked his vacation directly through a bareboat company, without the help of a reputable charter broker. That was the flaw, I told him, knowing that any decent broker would’ve listened to his family’s ideas and sent them directly to the British Virgin Islands.
There, for the same price, this family could’ve had a proper crewed yacht that cruised short distances in between islands, never going offshore at all. It’s for this reason that the Virgins are the classic destination for first-time charter clients in general.
I’m afraid my advice on the matter came too late for this particular family; the wife had sworn off yacht charter forever based on that first experience. It just goes to show you that working with a good broker to ensure a proper vacation is paramount, especially your first time giving charter a try.