Broker Ed Hamilton, writing on his website’s blog yesterday, announced the news that charterers booking yachts in the British Virgin Islands will no longer have to worry about the British Virgin Island Port Tax–which as of yesterday has been shelved.

As Hamilton put it, “We are of course very relieved. … We were not looking forward to making all those phone calls to existing clients, informing them their vacation would suddenly cost several hundred dollars more!”

There are two things I’d like to note about this news item.

First, for you as a charter client, it’s important to understand that the published base rates you see for yachts are absolutely not the bottom line in terms of what you’ll spend on a charter vacation. Expenses such as fuel, food–and, yes, port taxes in some destinations–will typically add between 10 percent and 25 percent to any yacht’s published base rate (unless the fee is explicitly stated as inclusive).

Second, I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to work with a reputable charter broker to ensure that your interests are being looked after. There’s a reason we have Ed Hamilton on our list of reputable brokers. Like many of the other brokers we recommend here on CharterWave, he is engaged not just in taking a commission for your vacation booking, but in genuinely working on your behalf, and on the industry’s behalf, in popular charter locations such as the British Virgin Islands.

I agree with Hamilton that the shelving of this port tax is a good thing for charter clients. Here’s hoping that the BVI government continues to see charter yachts as a valued part of the vacation community.

One of the most interesting conversations I had on the docks today at the Newport charter show was with Sharon Bahmer, a charter broker with (CharterWave home page sponsor) BoatBookings.com. She was telling me about business being slow among the $20,000- to $30,000-per-week boats not because they are too expensive in today’s sagging economy, but because airfare has risen so much that, for a group of eight charter clients to fly from the United States to the Caribbean, airfare becomes almost as costly as the charter yacht’s entire weekly expenses budget.

We’re talking smaller crewed yachts at that price point, the entry-level variety among the worldwide megayacht fleet. Even still, it’s a trend that is likely to worsen in the near future because of rising fuel prices, airline route cutbacks, and increasing ticket prices.

It’s hard to interpret just how bad this news is for the charter industry at this point, since most people won’t start booking airfare for their winter Caribbean charters for another few months. My guess, though, is that rising airfare prices will continue to be a problem, and that perhaps that problem will expand into ever-larger segments of the charter yacht industry (just as the strong euro already has dampened American bookings on yachts up to 130 feet in the Mediterranean this summer).

Stay tuned.

I received a phone call recently from a travel agent in Canada. He had a longtime client interested in booking a crewed yacht charter, he’d found CharterWave on the Web, and he had a few questions to run past me.

First, he wanted me to know, he’d done his homework and found a boat for his client. It was one whose brochure photos he had seen on several websites, and thus he felt the yacht was in great condition. He also had found a broker to work with, someone in Britain whom he’d never met, but who had been nice on the phone and had a professional website. He wanted me to confirm for him that the yacht and broker he’d found were both, in fact, on the up-and-up.

What a potential nightmare waiting to happen for this poor man’s client.

I share this story not to embarrass this man, who really was trying to help his client, but because it’s not the first time I’ve heard such comments from a travel agent. Most of the travel agents I’ve talked with about yacht charter really do think it’s all right to find boats for their clients on the Web. Some make the extra effort, as this travel agent did, to work with a broker to verify that what they’ve found is actually a good boat–but not one travel agent in my personal experience has understood how to tell a reputable charter broker from a potential huckster with a snappy website.

In this case, it turned out the broker this travel agent was working with was not a member of any key professional organizations, had never been aboard the yacht in question, and knew nothing about the crew. The travel agent learned all this after I suggested a few questions for him to ask, to help suss out whether the broker was reputable. The travel agent later contacted one of the brokers on our CharterWave reputable brokers list, and got firsthand information about the boat he’d seen online, including up-to-date information about the crew and the yacht’s level of maintenance (the broker featured here on CharterWave had been onboard for a firsthand evaluation not long ago). The travel agent then thanked me and said he wished he’d found CharterWave in the first place. He felt quite relieved.

All of which is good for this man’s client, but which forces me to state the obvious for you, the vacation-seeker: Why, if you want to book a yacht charter vacation, would you use a travel agent instead of a reputable broker? Why put an uninformed middleman between yourself and the person who knows about the type of vacation you’re seeking? Why trust your vacation to somebody whose understanding of your yacht and its crew is based on no better information than you could find yourself with a Google search?

Even hard-working, honorable travel agents like this Canadian man know that yacht charter is a specialty vacation requiring the kind of knowledge that only a reputable broker can provide. That’s why good travel agents work with brokers. And, in my opinion, it’s why you should, too.