The booking com and airbnb com of the yachting world

[Paddy Fields]

Hi all

This is my first post, and I hope it is acceptable one :-)

Quick intro - failed dinghy sailor, now with enough yachting experience to be mostly harmless.

A chartering newbie, I have spent a while looking for yacht charter in the med. The destination I have chosen happens to be the Costa Brava, which does not seem to be a favourite of the english speaking brigade, hence I have started looking at intermediaries, such as theglobesailor, clickandboat, latesail, boatbooking, etc. to help me navigate round the language barrier.

Im surprised that there is very little feedback or discussion on the pro's and con's of these charter brokering/peer2peer sites, so Im starting this thread.

Hopefully there will be a flood of replies to this post. Failing that, after I have booked, paid for, gone and come back, I will post my experiences here!

Cheers

Dan

[Pete7]

A large number of people on CF own their yacht, so don't need to charter. What little feed back there is normally starts when it all goes wrong.

Most of the feedback will be for popular areas like the Caribbean and Eastern Med.

Pete

[Paddy Fields]

Originally Posted by Pete7

A large number of people on CF own their yacht, so don't need to charter. What little feed back there is normally starts when it all goes wrong.

Most of the feedback will be for popular areas like the Caribbean and Eastern Med.

Pete

Ok, thank Pete. I did suspect this when I couldn't find a suitable sub-forum to post in!

[aye-aye-captain]

Hey Dan, so did you try any booking with such kind of business ?

Pierre

[Paddy Fields]

Originally Posted by aye-aye-captain

Hey Dan, so did you try any booking with such kind of business ?

Pierre

Ended up going to Corfu for a week in September. So many options there with English web sites, and the prices I got going direct were much better for the kind of boat I wanted (a small, scruffy boat) than the aggregating web sites. Might not be true of the bigger nicer boats.

So went (or at least tried) to go direct and book with the chartering company without intermediaries: great because I was more comfortable contracting with a single party. However my charting company ended up sub-contracting another chartering company (cosmos), with the ensuring mountain of paperwork! The boat was pretty scruffy, as expected :-), because I think it was the boat that their staff take out to look after a flotilla. The windex didn't work, but they fixed that pretty quickly (1/2 a day - luckily I happened to be in the marina). The gearbox played up, resulting in no neutral gear: much hilarity ensued during tight marina manoeuvres. In all a good "experience", which taught me a lot about chartering :-)