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.

“Once people see there is an alternative to big-ship, mass-market cruising, people will become hooked on luxury vessels.”

Sadly, this quote is not from anyone within the yacht charter industry. It is from the marketing director at Silversea, an upscale cruise line that is one of several mentioned in this article posted yesterday by MSNBC. The article’s headline? “Luxury Cruising is the Next Big Thing.” The number of times private yacht charter is mentioned? Zero.

I’ll tell you, I’m no longer surprised by stories like this coming out of the mainstream press, which takes many, many advertising dollars from the cruise ship industry. Most of these reporters simply fail to look past cruise ships for cruising articles, at any price point.

I used to get angry about articles like this, but nowadays I make it my personal business to expose them for the half-baked reporting that they really are. Anyone writing a story about luxury cruising, who fails to even acknowledge yacht charter as an option, simply isn’t doing her homework. Reporters used to be able to say the information simply wasn’t out there to find. Today, thanks to CharterWave in particular, the information is readily available and accessible to anyone who cares to seek it out.

Luckily for those of us who understand that charter yachts are safer, more environmentally friendly, often in the same per-person price range as cruise ships, and, well, just plain better, readers are turning out to be smarter than reporters like this one at MSNBC. They’re moving past mainstream media features about cruise ships and coming to sites like CharterWave directly, in our case to the tune of about 50,000 readers each year (and still steadily growing).

As that MSNBC article’s headline said, luxury cruising is, indeed, the next big thing. If you’re reading this blog post, then you are one of the smarter travelers who has actually come to the right place to find it.

The Internet has been abuzz this weekend with articles like this one, all bearing headlines that scream a “luxury yacht” was taken by pirates in the Gulf of Aden, between Somalia and Yemen. I even saw the news on CNN yesterday afternoon.

I’ve written on this topic before. Any time I see the word “yacht” and “pirate” in the same sentence, I am skeptical. In 99 percent of the cases the boat turns out to be a small cruise ship traveling in an area where proper charter yachts simply don’t go.

My first clue that this was the case yet again is the fact that this boat was seized between Somalia and Yemen–not exactly a hot spot of yachting activity. In fact, if you read the interview I posted last week about the Dubai Boat Show, then you know proper yachts are just now finding their way into this region. Charter isn’t likely to happen for another year or two, at least.

My second clue that this boat was not a yacht was its size: some 288 feet long, with a reported 30 crew members. Yes, there are charter yachts that big, but they are a rarity. And they rarely carry so many crew.

I did a bit more digging and found out that, indeed, The Ponant, as this boat is called, is in fact a small cruise ship. She has 32 cabins, and she takes 56 guests. She accepts by-the-cabin bookings at a price of about $3,500 per week.

In the world of private yacht charter, 12 is typically the most guests a boat can take. Rarely does a proper charter yacht have more than six or seven cabins, and they must be booked in their entirety by one charter party, not by individuals booking each cabin separately.

So again, I say, all these stories going online about a yacht being seized by pirates are not about a yacht at all. And I encourage you to be skeptical if you see a similar story in the future. Most often, the ships being seized in places like this are, in fact, cruise ships.