There are a couple of different ways to get a crewed charter yacht for your cruise vacation.

At the lowest end of the price spectrum is booking a bareboat--where you will be expected to help with line-handling and other basic tasks--and then adding a per-diem captain and/or chef as part of your package deal with the bareboat company.

These captains and chefs work onboard different bareboats each week, and they do not always work with each other. This means that while you are getting the service of a captain and maybe also a chef, that service itself may not be as fine-tuned as what you would experience onboard a charter yacht that has a regular partial or full crew onboard and working together at all times.

The mid-range option for a crewed charter yacht is called a partially crewed boat.

In some cases, a husband-and-wife team will act as your captain and chef aboard a single yacht they own and live aboard, or aboard a yacht that has a single owner instead of being part of a fleet. The husband and wife do virtually all of the work aboard, while occasionally asking you to lend a hand with smaller tasks that require a third set of hands. We’re talking two or three things the entire week, not two or three things each day.

You still sleep in the nicest cabins, while the two crew members sleep in the crew’s quarters--even if they own the yacht. The work you’ll be asked to do is no harder than what you’d do on a bareboat with a captain and chef--in most cases, you won’t be asked to do much at all--but with the husband-and-wife teams working aboard single yachts that they call home, your yacht itself is likely to be far nicer in terms of upkeep.

In a lot of cases, husband-and-wife teams running these kinds of charter yachts got their experience while working for fully crewed yachts.

Yachts with full crews are the most expensive charter vacations available. In some cases, the cost breaks down, per person, to what you might pay aboard a mid-range to high-end cruise ship. In other cases, particularly when the yachts are bigger than 125 feet long, the cost is well into six and sometimes even seven figures for a single week.

The yachts themselves can be impressive in all size ranges, even when they’re in the 60- to 80-foot-long range, but even in terms of the biggest, fanciest, most expensively built megayachts, what you are really paying for onboard fully crewed yachts is the service. Whether you want to have beach barbecues, formal dinners, or night after night of pirate-themed parties for your kids, the crew working full-time onboard yachts nowadays are trained to get the job done. They often are as attentive as the stewards and concierges you find at top-notch hotels in major cities, with the added bonus that they can teach you how to ride a Jet Ski or land a sailfish if that sort of thing appeals to you.

How can you determine which crew are the best? You can start by working with a knowledgeable charter broker and asking the right questions.

To learn more about your options, you can read Dream Cruises: The Insider's Guide to Private Yacht Charter Vacations,, from which this information is adapted.