Yachts and charters

A charter guest is buying a crew, not a boat. The specification sells the vessel — the beam, the tenders, the cabins — and then the week is decided almost entirely by five or six people living aboard with them, most of whom the guest will never quite learn to place.

It starts with a broker. Preferences are gathered weeks in advance, on a form: what is eaten, what is drunk, what is never to be touched, who is celebrating what. Whether that sheet survived the journey from the broker to the galley is the single clearest signal of how the week will run, and a guest reads it on the first evening without ever mentioning it.

Then there is no distance. A yacht has no back of house a guest cannot see. Service happens two metres away, all day, and a crew’s ability to be present without being in the room is the whole of the craft. What a party remembers afterwards is whether they felt watched or looked after.

• Owners and managers whose vessel is chartered by parties they will never meet.
• Anyone whose preference sheets are gathered carefully and never checked against what was actually served.
• Fleets where each crew delivers the same brochure in a noticeably different way.

• What the broking and the preference-gathering promised a guest before they boarded.
• Whether what was asked for in advance is what arrived.
• How presence and privacy were managed in quarters with no back of house at all.
• What the party was still saying about the week three days after stepping off.