I spent some time this morning touring a motoryacht called Harmony 1. She is part of the Merrill-Stevens fleet, a perfectly nice 105-footer that spends all year round here in the Mediterranean. Even though the boat’s proper name is Harmony 1, her brochure and related literature call her, simply, Harmony–which is the thing, I think, that threw off the charter broker who was onboard with me.

It was about halfway through the tour, down in the guest cabin area, when the broker said she couldn’t understand why the cabins were arranged so differently than their description in the book she’d been given before the show. According to her literature, the yacht had two cabins in particular that were rearrangeable to suit either four or six people. That didn’t look at all like what we were seeing.

Turns out, she was looking at literature for the 120-foot motoryacht Harmony, an entirely different boat by the same name that charters literally on the other side of the world through a whole other management company. She felt silly, of course, and laughed off the mistake–but at the same time made a quick note in her book to ensure she didn’t give bad information to a client like you in the future.

The lesson here–one that I repeat often here on CharterWave–is that it’s always best to book a charter yacht through a reputable broker who has actually stepped onboard. Simple confusion like this is something the better brokers avoid by doing thorough research before presenting charter yacht options to you. They know what’s in a brochure, and then they know what they’ve seen with their own two eyes. That’s why the best brokers attend these boat shows, to ensure they’re giving you accurate, up-to-date information before you book your charter yacht vacation.

Similarly, this is one of the main reasons I always suggest working with a reputable broker instead of going to a website that lets you book with a yacht directly. Let’s face it: If a professional broker who looks at yachts for a living can get confused, the odds are pretty high that you can, too.

The Triton, an excellent monthly newspaper written primarily for yacht crew, reported this week that the Italian island of Sardinia has changed the structure under which it is taxing yachts that dock at its ports. This affects charter clients as much as the yachts themselves, because when you book a charter, you pay for expenses such as taxes in addition to your yacht’s base rate.

According to The Triton’s article, Sardinia’s luxury tax will now be charged on a weekly instead of an annual basis. In many cases, this means the government will be able to collect more money from visiting yachts over the course of the June 1-September 30 summer cruising season.

For a charter yacht between about 100 and 200 feet long, the new weekly tax rate is 2,500 euro, or the equivalent of $3,872 at today’s exchange rate. It is not pro-rated, meaning you will be asked to pay the full amount if you stay for only two or three days of a seven-day Mediterranean charter.

Sardinia began imposing its luxury tax in 2006, and many charter yachts have avoided paying it by anchoring out instead of docking at the local marinas. If you’re planning a charter to Sardinia this summer, keep that in mind as an option. Simply cruising ashore in your charter yacht’s dinghy, instead of stepping ashore from a marina slip, can literally save you thousands of dollars.

There’s a heck of a lot of buzz on the Internet right now about the new 951-foot-long cruise ship Ventura, which P&O Cruise Lines launched this weekend in England–proudly hailing her as “the largest superliner ever built for the British market.” This is a whopper of a cruise ship, taking more than 3,000 passengers at a time. She’s currently on her maiden voyage in the Mediterranean.

A review of the new ship in London’s Sunday Times caught my attention, not because of all the activities and food it describes as being available onboard, but because at the end of the story, the writer quotes the price for a family of four to take a two-week cruise: 8,060 pounds, or the equivalent of $16,000 at today’s conversion rate.

I immediately hopped over to the website of CharterWave sponsor Virgin Island Sailing, which I know to have a regularly updated list of crewed yacht prices in the Virgin Islands–and where, just as I expected, I found several private charter yachts that would cost a family of four the exact same amount of money for a two-week vacation. If two families wanted to get together and double the overall budget to $32,000 for two weeks, there are a good number of well-kept charter yachts they could enjoy a vacation onboard.

It never ceases to amaze me that people would choose to cram their family onto a floating city at sea when they could relax onboard their own private yacht (with a captain and a chef!) for nary an extra cent.

I continually chalk such decisions up to ignorance–that people simply don’t know they have another,similarly priced option in yacht charter. I plan to keep pounding that message home here on CharterWave, like a person throwing a defiant pebble into the ocean of cruise ship media coverage.