Luxury Hotels
The hotel with a dock
A handful of grand hotels on the Mediterranean have their own tender landing. They are worth more to a yacht than any restaurant on the coast.
Shore leave
Luxury Hotels
A yacht and a hotel are not rivals. Luxury Hotels looks at the properties that serve the fleet: the grand hotels with their own dock, the resorts that work as a base for a charter or a crew change, and the hideaways where the tender is the only road.
Luxury Hotels
Luxury Hotels
The hotel as a base
Every charter that starts smoothly started the night before, in a hotel next to a marina with an airport an hour away.
Luxury Hotels
The island the boat cannot reach
There are places worth a week that no yacht programme reaches without a month of passage. That is what hotels are for.
The short version
Why owners sleep ashore
Owners of the largest boats in the world keep suites at hotels on the coast, and the reason is not the bed. A hotel gives a night off from the crew, a place to put the guests who arrive before the boat does, a lunch table with a view of the boat, and a dock for the tender that the marina cannot offer in August. The best hotels on the Riviera, the Costa Smeralda, Capri and St Barths have understood this for sixty years.
The second use is logistics. A charter that starts on Saturday needs guests who landed on Friday somewhere with a good bed, a boat that provisions on Friday afternoon and a crew change that happens without the guests watching. A hotel with a marina beside it, Porto Montenegro, Porto Cervo, Palma, Antibes, does all of that.
The third use is the trip the boat cannot make. The best of French Polynesia, the Maldives, the Seychelles and the outer Caribbean is reached by air and then by a hotel's own boat, and the week there is a different week, with the same standards and half the crew.
Worth knowing
Riviera grand hotels with a tender dock of their own
a handful, at Antibes, Cap Ferrat, Monaco and St Tropez, and their docks fill by ten in the morning
Suite on the coast in August, guide price
€3,000 to €12,000 a night at the famous names; a good hotel a bay away, a third of that
Hotels used as charter bases
those next to a marina with a fuel dock and a helipad; Porto Montenegro, Porto Cervo and Palma are the usual answers
Island hideaways reached by boat only
a few dozen worldwide, and most of them sell the whole island for a week
The deck vote
The hotel a yacht owner needs most is
Use it now
Shore Base Finder
Hotels with a dock, hotels as a charter base, and hotels for the week off the boat.
Questions people ask
At most of the grand hotels on the Riviera and in Italy, yes, if you are lunching or staying, and the concierge will want the boat's name and the tender's length. Some charge; most expect the bill at lunch to reflect the favour.
Those next to a marina where the boat can berth, fuel and provision, with an airport under an hour away and a helipad closer. In the Med that means Porto Montenegro, Porto Cervo, Antibes, Palma and Athens; in the Caribbean, St Maarten, Antigua and Nassau.
They are different weeks. The boat moves and the hotel does not; the boat has twelve staff for twelve guests and the hotel has a spa. Owners who have both tend to split the season: the boat for the coast, the hotel for the island the boat cannot reach.
For August on the Riviera, the Costa Smeralda or Capri, and for Christmas in St Barths, the year before. Shoulder season, a month. A concierge who knows the boat can sometimes find a room the website cannot.
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