the mid-2000s, Samuel Le Gall helped to get the fledgling Azimut Charter Club of the ground. The charter agency was a partner to industry powerhouse Fraser Yachts Worldwide, with the new group focusing on Azimut-built yachts in the 60- to 100-foot range. Le Gall and his colleagues created easy-to-sell, prepackaged experiences – the spa charter, the golf charter, that sort of thing – and calculated the engine hours needed to complete each itinerary. They then came up with all-inclusive pricing that would appeal to clients most likely to charter yachts in the Azimut size and price range, meaning primarily first-timers who were completely new to the yachting industry.

“We thought it would get a new market segment: travel agencies,” Le Gall recalls. “They may have qualifiedclients, but they don’t know how to sell yachts. To sell yachts side-by-side with cruise ships, when the agent presents the pricing, the yacht sounds like a scandal.”

The Azimut Charter Club did not survive, but the con-cept did. It’s now being tested in the form of Neo Yachting, a year-old company based in Nice, France, where Le Gall is a key player along with former Azimut Charter Club executive Nicolas Valin. Many of the yachts advertised through Neo are those same-size Azimuts, but today, they are marketed alongside Maioras, Palmer Johnsons, Ferrettis, Benettis, and more.

“On any yacht up to 100 feet, it can be done,” Le Gall says. “More important is that with that pricing structure, you have got the client onboard with the idea of charter. There are clients who start at 80 feet and the next year they book a 150. They just want to start slowly and reduce their risk until they understand how it works.”

Understanding how charter pricing works is one of the greatest obstacles that new clients face. They discover charter online, in a magazine, or in a promotional fler, where they see a yacht they like advertised at a weekly rate they can afford.They then call a charter broker, thinking they’re going to hear the kinds of things that are described by agents selling luxury villas and private islands – a base price, a price for extras, and a definitie bottomline. Instead, the charter broker speaks to them in an alphabet soup of APAs, VATs, and MYBA terms. They learn that the base rate is nothing more than an enticement price, like the midnight television ads that offer products for “only$9.99″ without mention of the $25 shipping and handling charge. By the time it’s explained that the crew gratuity alone can add 15 percent to any charter rate, many would-be clients bolt, thinking the broker is operating in a strange and shady way.

What those potential charterers fail to realize is that it’s not the broker. It’s the entire charter industry, trying to sell a vacation product in a way that no other travel segment does. “The price we give, the price we advertise, is not the price that the client pays,” Le Gall says. “It’s not that they don’t have the money. It’s that we are beginning the relationship with deception.”

If you ask around the industry, the standard belief is that charter pricing has evolved in tandem with the sales pitch that gets clients to book. “It’s your boat for the week.” “You can have anything you want.” “French champagne at 4 a.m. in the Exumas? Sure – we’ll helicopter it in.” These types of promises cannot possibly come with a set price, because nobody knows exactly what the client will end up wanting. The sales pitch itself makes a definitie pricing structure impossible.

And yet smaller yachts, like those in the Virgin Islands and the ones Neo Yachting is promoting in the Mediterranean, are regularly booked at all-inclusive rates. The broker explains to the client what he will get for his money, the yacht provides it, and everybody walks away from the charter experience smiling. The sales pitch is inherently differentfrom the start. The client’s expectations have been managed instead of amplified to the point of fantasy.

It’s hard to think of another product that is sold in the same way as luxury yacht charter. Not cruise ships, not private villas – not even custom – built homes, cars, or yachts themselves. When a buyer goes to Amels and says, “This is what I want on my fully custom 200-footer,” Amels provides a contract with a price before the client signs. There may be change orders that add to that price during the build process, but the client enters the financialrelationship with a realistic vision of the bottomline – a bottom line that is, for all intents and purposes at the start, an all-inclusive number.

So if the guy building the yacht can get a good idea of his final expenses, why is it so challenging for the guy chartering the yacht to enjoy the same benefit?

“I know charter brokers who are very good at getting close to a bottom line before a charter starts, even on the big boats,” says Leslie Adams, manager of the charter division at Feadship. “They’ve been at this a long time, they know how to communicate with the captain, the captain knows how to communicate with the client – everybody knows when things sound like they’re getting out of hand, and they won’t let the client’s budget get out of control. But it’s just not always possible. With a last-minute deal, it’s hard to get all of that up-front legwork done. Or you can have a captain who goes overboard despite the broker’s best efforts,or vice versa, and the client leaves the charter industry after just one experience.

Capt. Keith Moore of the 190-foot Abeking and Rasmussen Lady Sheridan says it is entirely possible to control costs on a large charter yacht. That’s not the same as offering allinclusive pricing, but it’s also not very far off “We really pride ourselves on looking afterthe client’s APA balance,” he says. “We try to buy direct instead of using agencies, which keeps costs down. And before a charter, myself, the chief stew, and the chef all try to speak with the client. That eliminates guesswork spending. We’re able to have everything they want as exactly as possible, to keep quality high and spending down. I feel there’s a lot of wasted money in this industry, and that can be avoided with extra crew effort. We take the time to do our due diligence. We don’t settle on the easy way out.”

That type of pre-planning is the same thing Le Gall says Neo Yachting is employing aboard smaller charter yachts, to create all-inclusive pricing in the firstplace. At the end of the day, a simpler pricing structure just seems to feel more natural to most clients. If they once bought a leather jacket and then later bought a fur coat, or if they once bought a Honda and then later a Bugatti,they didn’t have to pay differently. They just had to pay more. It’s not a question of how much the charters cost. It’s a question of how they are advertised, packaged, and sold.

“I recently heard a consultant from outside the yachting industry say that we should give 50 percent off the firstcharter to get people in the door,” Adams said. “He was looking at charter from a strictly business point of view, the way an outside investor would view it. At that same seminar, one of the interesting comments made was that other industries don’t get away with making the kinds of commissions that charter agents do. Look at real estate. Look even at the brokerage side of selling boats – those commissions are often negotiated down. People in the room who were involved in the yachting business, but not in charter, were making comments about charter commissions, too. It was shocking for me to hear, because it’s just the way things have been done for so long. It never occurred to me that hearing the commission percentage might prevent some people from booking, that they might see it as surprising or unusual.”

Growth in any industry depends on expanding the client base, and charter is no different. As Moore sees it, even if pricing structures don’t change, atttudes must.

“This industry looks at rich people with big, open pockets,” he says. “It’s unfair to the owners, and it’s unfair to the clients. They’re not cash cows. When the money outshines the fun, we’re all done.”

Publisher’s Opinion
Imagine checking into a luxury resort and being told that your room rate includes the staff’s wages, the staff’s meals, and the resort’s insurance. It sounds suspicious, doesn’t it? Of course one would expect such basics to be covered. And yet, this is exactly what charter clients are automatically advised as part of the standard terms. It’s obvious that some charterers want to stay put day after day while others want to move regularly. That means fuel. Some guests favor secluded bays while others want to be at marinas. That means dockage. Some drink the bar dry while others don’t drink at all. That means a liquor budget. We can all agree that charter operating costs will vary enormously depending on such factors, but the same is true for the costs incurred by luxury resorts that offer spa services, on-site dining, and water-sports equipment. Yet resorts are regularly offered at base rates that include many of the amenities, with additional, a la carte options priced separately. Why not settle on a similar, common approach for charter pricing across the globe? Such a pricing structure could always include accommodations plus three meals a day and use of the yacht’s equipment for one week for two adults – with everything else being extra. The “everything else” elements for each yacht could be separately listed on a standard industry menu (with ‘N/A’ or ‘Inc’ or the price, as appropriate) so retailers can see for themselves or be able to input their clients’ needs, leaving the search engines to do the work. What could be simpler?

Who the judges are, and who the winners are, continues to foment behind-the-scenes gossip year afteryear. Charter Index Editor Kim Kavin talks with first-time entrants, past winners, and one leading organizer about how chefs’ contests are organized and judged.

When a longtime charter fleetmanager talks about a particular chefs’ competition from the mid-2000s, he describes it with the clarity of a person remembering where he was the day two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center. ”

I was standing there at the awards ceremony, listening to the winners’ names being announced,” says the manager, who asked to remain anonymous. “Of course, I’m rooting for our chef, but then I watched the announcer open the envelope, and I felt that something very wrong had happened. As the announcer looked at the results, she smiled and said, ‘Ah, the winner is so-and-so, and I’d just like to personally thank the captain for the wonderful dinner and wine that I enjoyed onboard last night.’ She didn’t even take a breath in between. It appeared so obvious that the two things were connected.”

The manager’s attitude toward chefs’ contests is not exclusive to him alone. Countless captains, chefs, and charter yacht managers have complained in years past – sometimes loudly – that they believe chefs’ competitions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are laced with a black streak of politics. It’s frustrating, they say,that the same chefs seem to win year afteryear. It’s not even worth entering, they claim, if the judges have their favorites chosen before the food even goes onto the plates.

It is impossible to say whether such claims are the sour grapes of losing competitors or the scuttlbutt of an industry scandal. Only the judges know for sure, and by all appearances at recent boat shows from Newport to Genoa, the judges are acting honorably.

Even still, says Sarah Sebastian of the Antigua Charter Yacht Show, it’s understandable that longtime industry veterans might recall the days when certain yachts had an undue advantage.

“I took over the chef’s competition afterShowboats stopped doing it at the St. James Club, and only for the boats that were anchored there—and they happened to be all of the boats in the Bob Saxon charter fleet,”she says. “That was something like 13 years ago, but it was always Bob Saxon boats that placed number one, two, and three.”

Nowadays, yachts docked at all three Antigua venues are eligible to compete, and the contest itself is run on a rigorous, public schedule. Registration opens online at 9 a.m. each November 1, and by noon, the competitor slots for the December contest are usually full, Sebastian says. The composition of the judging panel changes from year to year, as does the requirement for what the chefs must prepare. The idea, Sebastian says, is to make it impossible for any previous competitors to have an advantage against new entrants. ”

We have had judges who know chefs in the industry,” Sebastian says. “But we also try to have one or two longtime charter yacht chefs as judges, because the competitors say they enjoy being judged by their peers. And we never ask retail brokers or charter managers to judge, because we don’t want any bias for a certain fleet to creep in.

To many chefs who enter the competitions, the playing fieldappears completely fair. The 2010 Antigua Concours de Chef, for instance, was the first industry contest ever entered by Chef Tarina Shadget of the 163-foot Christensen Casino Royale. She was not just new to the contest, but also relatively unknown in the charter industry, having worked as a photo lithographer until she was 30 years old and then, once on yachts, keeping mostly to herself in the galley.

After meeting with the judges and seeing the precision with which they tasted and examined her food, Shadgettwas nervous about her odds, but she felt that she had as good a chance as anyone at winning. ”

I usually avoid these contests, but I went in hoping that everybody is judged by the same rules,” she says. “I’m rather insular—I don’t know everybody in this industry—but that should not be a disadvantage in a competition.”

Chef Patrick Roney of the 132-foot Amels Monte Carlo felt the same way. Roney is the opposite of Shadgett,having won the 2009 chefs’ competition at the Newport Charter Show and having earned a reputation for excellence among many industry leaders during his time aboard the 115-foot Crescent Kapalua.

Even still, Roney appeared nervous in early December 2010 as he donned his chef’s jacket and made his way, alongside all the other competitors, toward the announcement of winners at the Admiral’s Inn at Nelson’s Dockyard. When people wished him good luck, he thanked them in a manner that indicated he thought he truly needed it.

As Shadgett,Roney, and all the other competitors waited with anticipation of this year’s Antigua contest results, Sebastian was flankedby the panel of judges. There was Chef Anne Carson of the sailing yacht Adele, Beverly Grant of MCI Yachts, Executive Chef Nigel Marten of Nonsuch Bay Resort in Antigua, Troy Bailey of Liat Quikpak Antigua, and two representatives of Boat International publications.

Sebastian read the results as the sun set over Nelson’s Dockyard, occasionally handing the microphone to the judges to reveal the winners’ names. In several instances, chefs’ names were mispronounced—an indication that the judges didn’t know the chefs they were judging at all.

When the evening came to a close, industry veteran Roney had earned a second-place nod in the category for yachts from 111 to 159 feet. The big winner of the season was Shadgettfrom Casino Royale. Her firstever entry nabbed the top prize in the megayacht division, which is the most prestigious of all.

She bounded up to the stage to accept her applause, her face beaming like a child’s with surprise. And while no other winning chef had been given a chance to speak into the microphone that night, Shadgettgrabbed it just long enough to tell the crowd, “This is for my crew.”

Her firstthought was far from thanking the judges, or even acknowledging them as a behind-the-scenes cohort might. Instead, her only words gave her crew mates their due for a job not only well done, but also well recognized in the eyes of the charter industry.

When a potential client types the phrase “luxury yacht charter” into the Google search engine, two types of results appear on their computer screen. The ones at the top (with a faint color wash in the background) and along the right hand side are paid search results. The rest, which make up the bulk of the screen, are called organic – and are far more trustworthy in the minds of many online shoppers.

Paid search results are just what they sound like. Companies pay Google – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars each month – so that when a chosen search phrase is input, their company’s website will be listed first.Phrases highly coveted by paid search clients in the charter industry include “luxury yacht charter,” “yacht charter Mediterranean,” and “yacht charter Caribbean.” The price for these terms is set not by Google, but by charter companies themselves. It’s a winner-take-all game with the key slots going to the highest bidders (and Google winning all the money).

Organic search results are different.They are the websites that show up in the middle of the results screen, and they cannot be bought directly. Instead, Google uses a secret algorithm to determine which websites are truly the best match for the terms being searched. The algorithm is believed to include a combination of a website’s time in existence, number of total pages, inbound links from other sites, and other such things that Google believes are more “organically” controlled. While you can of course pay a fortune to develop a website that fitsthe Google definitionof organic, the company is bettingthat its ever-changing algorithm will keep scam artists out of the organic results listings.

That last bit is the reason why savvy Google users trust organic search results more than paid search results. According to the Internet marketing firmHubspot, not only do people click on organic results more often,but the people who click on them also typically have a higher level of education – they’re doingsmarter Web surfing.

So, how can you climb higher within Google’s organic search results? Here are three tips to get you started.

Update your website regularly.

Google findspages on the Web by sending out “spiders” to crawl every website in existence. The more oftenyou update your website, the more oftenGoogle’s spiders will visit – and the more those spiders will report back that you are posting fresh, new content. If you are updating your website once a month, and your competitor is updating once a day, which site do you think Google will rate higher when trying to give people the newest and best information online?

Learn the basics of search-engine optimization.

The words you choose when writing Web content are just as important as your overall message. The specific phrases matte. Their location on the page matters.Google believes that the sentence “Luxury yacht charter in the Mediterranean is fun” is more valuable in certain searches than “I went to the Mediterranean last summer and really enjoyed a luxury yacht charter.” Why? Because in the firstsentence, the key words and phrases – luxury yacht charter Mediterranean – are closer to the beginning. That’s search-engine optimization.

Target attainablesearch terms.

“Yacht charter Mediterranean” is an example of a highly desired keyword phrase because Google’s own data regularly show that it is one of the most-often searched in the industry. Big – spending companies thus go afterit on a monthly basis – which means you are playing a losing financial game if you try to out-bid them. On the other hand, terms such as “yacht charter Croatia” and “yacht charter France” are regularly searched, but not as top-of-the-list popular. If you target those instead, you will have a greater chance of actually having an impact on them. It’s a simple matterof less competition for a more targeted audience.

Interpac Yachts

Boat shows are a vital part of the charter industry. They provide an opportunity for brokers to visit the destinations we offerand to learn the unique details and features of the yachts we represent. For the most part, we see the yachts “charter ready,” just as our clients do when they board, complete with fresh linens, table settings, and floralarrangements. Charter shows also provide a wonderful opportunity to learn more about the cuisine offeredon many of the yachts (through lunches and culinary competitions), to get a sense of the atmosphere onboard, and to see how well each crew is working together as a team. The shows also allow for attedance at great seminars, broker association meetings, and networking with other agents. Overall, boat shows are a very positive experience.

The only negatives are the thousands of dollars we must spend each year to attendthese shows, and the time that must be spent away from home and officeThis time and money, however, is an excellent investment and is crucial to staying current in an everchanging industry.

Central Agent: Els Bucknell,

Churchill Yacht Partners

Charter brokers are our clients. We need to sell our products to charter brokers in order to get their clientele’s business. Boat show positives include the opportunity to showcase fleetyachts so that a lasting impression may be lefton the charter broker’s mind. Yachts and crew are given the opportunity to sell themselves by showing their true hospitality, enthusiasm, and personal style. A fineexample of readiness is the captain of a yacht doing a walk-through with his crew the day before the show and highlighting all points that charter brokers would be keen to know, or that would help sell yacht charters.

It is also wonderful to finallymeet in person the charter brokers I have been communicating with for a long time.

The negative of boat shows is that when they are filledwith more than a hundred yachts, the show itself can be overwhelming. Many professional charter brokers arrive at shows very well prepared with their strategy pre-thought and their mission clear. They know exactly what they’ve seen and what they need to see. On the down side, they could be so focused and well prepared that they might miss a real gem.

It is imperative that the crews are well prepared with what to expect and what is expected. A yacht that is not ready to show, or a crew who are uneager to participate, could do more damage than good.

Charter Captain: Roy Hodges,

Atlantica – International Yacht Collection

My favorite thing about charter shows has to be the yacht hops. They really give the crew a chance to shine. During the day, the crews are all in uniforms and, let’s face it, we all kind of look alike. During the yacht hops, though, the crews get to show their creativity and personality.

I let my crew pick the theme of our yacht hop. My stews get to come up with a signature drink for the night. The chef gets to come up with some with special hors d’oeuvres. Everyone pitches in to decorate and host the party. The brokers get to be around the crew in a more relaxed environment and get a feeling for what their clients are going to experience.

The worst part about the boat shows has to be the rain. I’m not sure a meteorological phenomenon occurs during the shows, but if it were possible I would suggest moving them to locations that are experiencing droughts. The crew put so much time and effortinto making the boats look their best and 10 minutes before the brokers arrive it is always going to rain. Then the covers have to go back on the exterior furniture and the chamoising must begin again at the first sign of a letup