Feadship announced today that it is the newest yacht builder to enter the charter business, joining the likes of Sunseeker and Hargrave, which have had their own branded charter agencies for a while. The Dutch company’s Feadship Charter Division will operate out of its offices in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The new division is being created “in response to a significant number of requests from Feadship owners, as well as people seeking to charter a Feadship,” Feadship America President Francois van Well said in a press release.

Like the Sunseeker and Hargrave operations, the Feadship Charter Division’s fleet will include only boats built by its brand-name yard. There is currently one boat available, according to marketing manager Francis Vermeer: the F45 Vantage Harle, which booked a charter through the company this past Easter.

The person who will run the new Feadship Charter Division is D.J. Kiernan, who as I type this is on a plane bound from Holland to the United States and, thus, unavailable for comment. I asked Vermeer whether Kiernan was a broker, and she said, “Broker is the wrong word. He is the contact person.”

I checked the membership rosters of the four key professional organizations for international charter brokers: MYBA, CYBA International, AYCA, and FYBA. It appears the only one Kiernan is connected with is FYBA, but according to their offices, he was a member last year and failed to renew his membership dues for 2008.

That’s less than ideal, as you regular readers of CharterWave know–and it seems to be a trend among boatbuilders who open their own charter divisions. Hargrave and Sunseeker started out operating the same way, using people who were not yet connected with the reputable charter broker community to launch their own divisions.

It will be interesting to see how many Feadships migrate from established charter management companies into the shipyard’s new Charter Division under these circumstances. I hope to get more information about the new division for you on Monday, when Kiernan is scheduled to be back and available for questions.

If you don’t check the CharterWave home page regularly, then you might have missed the new featured story I uploaded this week. It’s an interview with broker Gail Hartman of (CharterWave sponsor) V.I. Sailing. She was at the industry-only charter show on Tortola earlier this month while I was over in Europe at the Genoa charter show.

Our exclusive interview with Gail includes her opinion about what’s happening in the Virgin Islands charter market right now–and I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised to learn from her that business is still strong. Some of the yachts have had to raise their all-inclusive rates to account for rising fuel costs, but aside from that, she told me, demand for crewed charters in the Virgin Islands is still quite good.

I found this surprising because when I was in Europe earlier this month, I heard a good bit of grumbling about how the 100- to 130-foot charter yachts (the heart of that market) are suffering from a lack of demand this summer. All the blame was put on the strength of the euro, which makes it too costly for many Americans to charter in the Western Mediterranean the way they have in years past.

The same seems to be true in the Eastern Mediterranean. I did an interview yesterday with broker Missy Johnston of Northrop & Johnson Worldwide Yacht Charters about her experience earlier this month at the industry-only charter show in Greece (I’ll be posting that for you this weekend). She said the larger sailing and motoryachts in Greece are being booked for this summer, but by far fewer Americans than usual–a trend that has that market concerned.

It’s interesting to me that those bigger yachts in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean are feeling the effects of world economic patterns while the smaller (mostly sailing catamaran) yachts in the Virgins do not seem to be having the same problem. You’d think that the Americans who charter smaller yachts have less disposable income to begin with, and that the market with the smallest yachts would thus suffer a lack of demand well before the markets with the larger yachts.

Then again, it could be that because the Virgins boats are typically priced in dollars, their regular American clients see them as the same good deal they have been considered in years past. If that’s the case, then the charter yachts moving up to New England right now might be in for a very good season.

It will be interesting to hear the chatter on the docks in Newport when I head up there for that industry-only boat show in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

It’s funny how I had to fly from New York to Italy so that I could learn from a California-based charter broker about the boat in the above photograph, which is managed by a German company that is sending it to Antarctica.

Such was my experience at the Genoa charter show earlier this month, where broker Liz Howard from the San Diego office of Fraser Yachts Worldwide introduced me to a woman named Beate Hillwig, who was at the show to promote the Hanse Explorer. It’s a year-and-a-half-old, 157-foot-long, ice-class vessel that was originally built to take by-the-cabin bookings, but that now is functioning solely as a private charter yacht, taking 12 guests with 16 crew at a lowest weekly base rate of 85,000 euro.

Now, I don’t typically buy into sales pitches like this one from people I don’t know. When I get handed a brochure at a boat show and hear the phrase “by-the-cabin-bookings” right before “but now we’re a yacht,” I’m often skeptical that a vessel is offering a true charter yacht experience.

In this case, though, I have the recommendation of Howard, a broker I have known for years and come to trust. She has a client who is interested in charters beyond the typical Caribbean and Mediterranean, so she went to see Hanse Explorer for herself–and she tells me the boat is absolutely, positively operating at yacht-level quality.

That’s exciting stuff, given what Hillwig told me is the upcoming itinerary for Hanse Explorer. It will be heading to Antarctica from November through March of 2009, with the summer before that spent in Canada, the Northwest Passage, Greenland, and the Arctic. In between visiting the Earth’s poles, Hans Explorer is expected to offer some charters in the Amazon and the South Pacific.

“We all come from the expedition market,” Hillwig told me of marketing company Oceanstar, “so we know the areas. For instance, when we visit the South Pacific, we go to the island where Christian Fletcher hid out after the mutiny on the Bounty. It’s an amazing place where other boats don’t go. All the people on the island are descendants of the Bounty’s crew.”

Neat-o. The boat sounds pretty groovy, too, having been built by the owner of a freighter shipping company who wanted to travel the world, but couldn’t get everywhere he wanted to go onboard his private sailing yacht. Sounds like a guy who knows a thing or two about vessel safety in off-the-beaten-course places, as well as a guy who actually plans to follow through on making his boat available for charters in the destinations being promoted.

Typically, I would tell you to contact any reputable charter broker for more information about Hanse Explorer, but in this case, I think it’s fair that I direct you straight to Liz Howard at Fraser Yachts, since Howard is, according to Hillwig, the only international broker who has actually been onboard the boat. She also booked the first proper charter onboard (which is upcoming), so she will be in a position to discuss how the company operates with an actual client, as well as how the crew performs.