The hotel as a base

A charter starts on Saturday at noon. The guests land on Friday evening, the boat provisions on Friday afternoon, the crew change happens on Friday morning, and none of that should be visible to anybody. The place where all three converge is a hotel next to a marina, and there are perhaps a dozen in the Mediterranean that do it properly.

What makes a base

• A marina alongside that can berth the boat, fuel her and take a provisioning truck.
• An airport within an hour that handles private aircraft, and a helipad closer.
• Rooms that can be held for a party arriving at eleven at night with twenty two bags.
• A concierge who deals with yachts regularly and knows the agents, the clubs and the drivers.
• Somewhere the crew can also be, without being in the same bar as the guests.

Porto Montenegro, Porto Cervo, Palma, Antibes, Athens and, in the Caribbean, Saint Maarten and Antigua all have versions of this arrangement, and the difference between a start there and a start somewhere charming is the difference between a holiday and a first day spent solving problems.

The crew change

Crew changes are the invisible logistics of the industry. Somebody flies out, somebody flies in, handover is a day, and the boat cannot be short of an engineer when guests arrive. A base with an airport, hotels and a crew house nearby absorbs that. A base without one turns every rotation into a three day problem with a hire car.

The night before

For guests, the reason to arrive a day early is not logistics, it is the first day. A party that lands at nine in the morning, boards at noon and goes straight to sea spends the first afternoon asleep on the sundeck and the first dinner quiet. The same party that arrived the night before, slept, swam in the morning and came aboard rested actually has seven days.

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Shore Base Finder

Hotels with a dock, hotels as a charter base, and hotels for the week off the boat.

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