The short answer...of course not!
A successful businessman recently told me ‘You know, I think I’d get bored on a yachting holiday.’ Seeing my surprised look, he explained that he’s a pretty restless guy, and thought that yachting—as glamorous as it seemed—just wouldn’t be for him, as it seemed there wouldn’t be enough to do onboard for the whole week.
This conversation got me thinking. How many other people out there discount yachting holidays because they feel like they might be ‘bored on board’?
What the businessman didn’t understand is that the yachting experience is designed for active people. Yachting is, at its core, an adventure— an exotic holiday where you might choose to night dive with sharks, kayak through icebergs, or take a helicopter ride over a grumbling volcano. If an exciting, adrenaline-filled vacation is what you seek, there can be no better way to find it than through a luxury yacht charter.
But obviously, that message hasn’t gotten through to everyone. All the glossy superyacht marketing of sun-bronzed guests relaxing in the Jacuzzi clearly hasn’t worked to convey what a thrilling experience a yachting vacation really is.
Reasons why you won’t get bored on a superyacht holiday
It’s wildly more exciting than a luxury hotel.
When you check into a hotel or villa for a week, the view from your window will never change. You’ll spend time in traffic to visit different beaches and sites of interest, and have to move hotels if points of interest are far apart. On a yacht, the view is ever-changing, as you wake up to secluded beaches, glamorous ports, and tropical atolls. Every day is a different view, and a different adventure awaits you.
The yacht offers an endless array of sights and experiences.
You might kayak through bioluminescence in the Spanish Virgin Islands, or anchor off the Mayan pyramids on the Mexican coast at Tulum. You could dive the cenotes in Cuba, sink into the mysterious Blue Hole of Belize, or cliff-dive off the city walls in Dubrovnik.
A summer’s afternoon might see you spraying champagne in a Saint Tropez beach club, jet-skiing down the Amalfi Coast, or exploring ancient temples on windswept Greek islands. On a yachting vacation you might swim with seals in the Galapagos, watch grizzlies catch salmon in Canada, or be blown away by a winter skiing and yachting adventure under Norway’s northern lights. And after each experience, you go back to the yacht to weigh anchor and speed towards the next adventure. A yachting holiday, boring?
The yacht is a one-stop toy shop.
Yachts are all about fun in the sun, and charter yachts carry a huge range of watertoys to get the adrenaline flowing, from scuba and fishing gear to wakeboards and waterslides. Superyacht toys are getting increasingly more futuristic, with Jetpacks, inflatable obstacle courses, and even personal submarines entering the mix. One thing is certain: there’s nothing like returning to your charter yacht after an afternoon on the watertoys, muscles aching and grinning from ear to ear. If that’s not enough exercise for you, you can jog on a perfect tropical beach each morning, play golf in world-class resorts, and even organise a yoga teacher to come out to the yacht for lessons. Each morning, the captain will come to you with a list of captivating activities to choose between—and there won’t be time to do them all!
A superyacht has plenty of entertainment onboard.
Charter yachts all have Wifi these days, so you don’t risk being cut off from the world. The vessel will also carry a wide array of movies, games, and entertainment, meaning that you’ll never be stuck for something to do- and larger yachts also have onboard cinemas, spas, and gyms to really ramp up the activities onboard.
A yacht rarely travels long distances with guests onboard.
This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about yachting; that guests will be ‘trapped’ on board for many hours while the yacht travels from place to place. In general, the really popular charter destinations such as the Caribbean and Mediterranean have many places of interest within a very short distance of each other, so that the cruising is extremely short and scenic. For example, you can make it from one end of the French Riviera to the other within a few hours on a motoryacht, while there are over 60 islands in a very small geographic area in the British Virgin Islands, many of which are within clear sight of each other! So you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll get bored on long passages, and your yacht broker can advise you on the best itineraries to suit your needs. If you do pick an itinerary with long distances between points of interest, the captain can drive the yacht to the next destination while you’re sleeping- so you wake up to a new glorious place every morning, far from where you’ve started.
You can time your yacht charter to coincide with your favourite events.
You could watch a game at Yankee Stadium before cruising through picturesque New England to Boston to see the Red Sox hit a home run at Fenway Park. In the Mediterranean, you can soak up the electric atmosphere of the Monaco Grand Prix, or watch the film stars and paparazzi on the red carpet in Cannes. You might want to see the motorsport in Dubai, the horse-racing in Singapore, the music festivals of Croatia, or the Venice Film Festival.
Superyacht holidays are endlessly customisable, giving you the opportunity to truly ‘choose your own adventure’. It doesn’t matter what your passion is, (even skiing or dune biking in the desert), you can create a fantastically memorable yacht charter to accommodate that dream. Yacht charters may have traditionally been seen as exclusively summer and sunshine holidays, but they’re now diversifying to be whatever you want them to be.
In truth, the scope and excitement of a superyacht charter is limited only by your imagination.
Contributed by: Jo Morgan
