The folks in the above photo are Sandy and Tom Taylor, who announced this week that they are officially opening a booking agency called Taylor’d Yacht Charters.

I’ve known Sandy for quite some time now, most recently in her capacity as the head of retail charter and crew placement for Northrop & Johnson. She left that job last year to join her husband Tom, former executive director of Northrop & Johnson, in starting their own business booking charter vacations for clients worldwide.

The Taylors have a combined 20 years’ experience in the marine industry, working at everything from yacht support to charter management at firms as large as Camper & Nicholsons International. They now plan to combine their big-company expertise with the personal service that a boutique company can provide.

They’re based in Natchez, Mississippi, and are members of the Florida Yacht Brokers Association. Plus, I can personally attest, they’re darn nice people.

For more information, check out their newly launched website.

The folks at Sunseeker Charters have put up a new website specifically geared toward short-term, corporate yacht charters in the United Kingdom, which is the company’s base of operations.

What a great idea. While a good number of charter companies have sections of their existing websites that discuss corporate charters, this is the first time I’ve seen a company develop a standalone website about the option. The site includes not just available yachts, but also one- and two-day itineraries, a listing of annual charter-friendly events, and links to on-shore catering venues that can be paired with a corporate yacht charter experience.

“We have developed this website in response to the increasing demand for this extremely popular style of corporate entertainment,” Sunseeker Charters Director David Ward said. “From the information shown on the site, clients will be able to see not only the unrivaled range of vessels we have on offer, but also the variety of options that are possible in the areas in which we operate.”

That’s the one catch with this new website: the areas in which Sunseeker Charters operates. While the company does have full-term charter yachts available around the world, this new corporate website is highly focused on the United Kingdom.

Still, it’s a great example of a new way to offer information about charter to readers like you. I hope that other companies providing corporate charter services worldwide will take note, and give us all even more resources for information like this in the future.

The charter agency BoatBookings.com (a CharterWave sponsor) has a nifty new feature on its website for anyone who wants to be environmentally minded when choosing a charter yacht.

As with many charter websites, when you click on the name of a charter yacht at BoatBookings.com to learn more information, you’ll get standard items like boat length, number of cabins, and the like. Now, though, you will also get carbon emissions data on that very same page, allowing you to compare one yacht’s CO2 emissions against another’s before deciding which charter is right for you.

That’s a feature I haven’t seen anywhere else. What a great idea.

If you click on this Mangusta 80 motoryacht, for instance, you’ll see that she creates about 9,500 pounds of CO2 during a typical three-hour cruise. If you compare that to this 120-foot Benetti motoryacht, you’ll see that the latter creates about 5,200 pounds of CO2 during the same cruising time. Bigger boat, fewer emissions–if that is one of the criteria on which you plan to choose a charter yacht.

In each case, BoatBookings.com tells you what it would cost to offset the yacht’s typical emissions with carbon credits. You can extrapolate the total for a week’s charter or longer by multiplying the number of days you plan to cruise by the typical three-hours-per-day cruising that is typical onboard most charter yachts.

“This, of course, is just an estimate,” BoatBookings.com President Tom Virden told me. “If the customer wants to be precise, we just ask the captain to provide us with how much fuel was actually consumed at the end of the charter. We then calculate the exact CO2 emissions and the cost to offset them. We bill the client and then buy carbon credits in this amount–and we obviously take no commission or kickback.”

Virden says the CO2 information is currently available on about 10 percent of the charter yacht listings at the company’s website. The rest will become available as quickly as the staff can type them into the database.

If the charter yacht you’re considering isn’t yet one of the ones with this feature on its page, then you might also check out this general description of green chartering or use the BoatBookings.com carbon emissions calculator, which you can access through a link on that same page.

Good stuff, indeed, for us as charterers and for the planet in general.