The annual Antigua Charter Yacht Meeting, a boat show for charter brokers, wraps up today, after several days of onboard tours and meetings with crews. The goal is to help brokers better learn which yachts and teams suit their clients’ preferences and personalities.
Kim Kavin, the leading charter writer and editor and the founder of CharterWave, has also been touring the yachts and interviewing people at the show this week. I asked her to be a guest writer for Megayacht News; here’s her report, with exclusive news about the Feadship Charter Division.
Feadship Charter Division, which was quietly created in January 2008 and publicly announced six months later, is preparing to double the size of its in-house charter fleet in time for the summer 2010 Mediterranean season.
I learned this tidbit from division director D.J. Kiernan as we enjoyed a lunch of iced gazpacho, roasted mini-racks of lamb, and more Wednesday afternoon at the Antigua Charter Yacht Meeting. We were aboard the 214-foot Feadship Trident (above), whose weekly base rate in the Caribbean this winter is $495,000 for 12 guests with 14 crew.
The F45 Harle was the first yacht that Feadship launched into its charter fleet. Trident, which launched this summer, is the second. Kiernan told me the next F45, which is yet to be named, and the SL39 Go are scheduled to launch in April and May and become available for charter through Feadship in the Mediterranean next summer.
Kiernan said that, though he is happy to be expanding from two yachts to four, he does not expect the growth to affect the way his division operates in general.
“I do a very small amount of retail bookings,” he said. “That’s just the honest truth. We tend to charter to people who are building a Feadship and who want to go cruising before their own boat launches.”
Kiernan also made clear at lunch today that Feadship has no desire to become a full-on charter agency, nor to control every Feadship that is available for charter. He pointed across the dock at the Antigua Yacht Club to the 175-foot Hurricane Run, which launched in January and, like her owner’s previous Feadship, High Chaparral, went straight into the charter fleet at Camper & Nicholsons International.
“We’re always going to be a little different at Feadship,” Kiernan said. “After all, charter isn’t our core business.”
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