One of the things I heard a lot of talk about at last week's Antigua charter yacht show was discounts. And not in the way I've been hearing about them during the past few months.

As you know if you follow my blog, deals and discounted rates have been flooding the crewed charter market for a little more than a year now, as yacht owners try to adapt to the financial pressures of the continuing global recession. Brokers have been pushing for deeper and deeper discounts on behalf of charter clients, and though not all yacht owners have obliged, a good number have.

The talk on the docks last week was different because, instead of all the brokers saying they wanted to negotiate the biggest discounts possible, I began to hear some brokers saying that if they saw a yacht offering more than a 15-percent discount, they would think twice before trying to book it for their client at all.

One broker from Ocean Independence put it to me this way: "If the discount being offered is more than 15 percent, something is wrong. Either something is wrong with the boat that is making it desperate to charter, or the owner of the boat is desperate for money. Either of those things is bad for my charter client. I don't want to send my clients onto boats that might be falling apart, or whose owner cannot stand financially behind the charter if something goes wrong."

I thought about this comment in the context of a conversation that I had with Capt. Warren East aboard the 73-foot sailing catamaran Wonderful, which has earned a strong reputation in the charter industry during the past few years (and which looks terrific following a recent makeover).

Capt. East told me that his yacht has four weeks of charter booked for the upcoming Caribbean season, plus three inquiries for additional bookings. "That's obviously not the level of business we have done in years past," he said, "but we're hanging on. The bigger problem is that we made so many concessions last year. We were chartering at nearly half price. We need to get the rates back up toward normal so that we can continue to maintain the boat to the expected standard, but now some of the brokers are coming back and wanting those same discounts. We can't give them and still provide the same level of experience for the client."

This particular broker and this particular captain were discussing two sides of the same coin: quality. 

The past year in crewed yacht charter has been very much about clients trying to get more than they paid for. The coming year, I think, might turn out to be about ensuring that you actually get quality for your charter dollar or euro. 

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