There are maybe eight websites that matter for chartering a yacht, and they are not interchangeable. They pull from different inventory, take different cuts, and are good at genuinely different things. Booking a bareboat Bavaria in Croatia and booking a crewed catamaran in the BVI are not the same transaction, and the tool that suits one is the wrong tool for the other.
We book through most of these professionally. Here is what each is actually for.
The Short Version
| Platform | Best for | Inventory | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boataround | Bareboat sailing in the Med | ~14,000 yachts, fleet-sourced | Thinner outside Europe |
| Zizoo | First-time charterers | 30,000+ boats, 500 destinations | Reviews skew to the big fleets |
| Click&Boat | Breadth, day charters | 50,000+ vessels, 60+ countries | Mixes fleets with private owners |
| GetMyBoat | Discovery, non-European | Large, map-driven | Instant booking hides operator quality |
| SamBoat | France, Spain, Italy | Strong Western Med | Interface is the weakest of the group |
| MYBA brokers | Crewed yachts over €25k/week | Not a website | No instant pricing, and that is the point |
Boataround — The One We Use Most for Bareboat
Boataround works directly with charter fleets rather than individual owners, and it shows in the listings. When a boat says 2022 Bavaria C46, it is a fleet boat with fleet maintenance behind it and a base manager who does check-ins all season.
The practical advantage is that the listings carry the information a sailor needs: year built, cabin and head configuration, whether there is a bimini and a generator, what the deposit is. Around 14,000 yachts, weighted heavily towards Croatia, Greece, Italy and Turkey.
Where it thins out is anywhere that is not the Mediterranean. If you are chartering in the Caribbean or Southeast Asia, it will show you options but not the best ones.
Zizoo — The Easiest If You Have Not Done This Before
Zizoo has been described as the booking.com of boats, which is fair in both the good and the slightly limiting senses. Over 30,000 boats across roughly 500 destinations, presented in a way that a first-time charterer can navigate without knowing what a Dufour 460 is.
The filtering is the strongest part. You can narrow by cabins, by whether a skipper is included, by base, and get to a shortlist in a few minutes rather than an afternoon. For someone who has read First Time Yacht Charter and wants to see what the money buys, this is where we would send them first.
The thing to be aware of is that review volume clusters around the large fleets. A boat with nine reviews from a big operator is not necessarily better than one with none from a small excellent family fleet in Sardinia. Absence of reviews is not evidence of anything on a platform this size.
Click&Boat — The Biggest, With a Caveat Worth Understanding
Click&Boat lists over 50,000 vessels across more than 60 countries, and it absorbed Nautal, which used to be the main Spanish-language competitor. If you want to know whether a boat exists somewhere, this is the widest net.
The caveat is structural rather than a criticism. Click&Boat began as a peer-to-peer marketplace, the Airbnb model applied to boats, and it still carries a large volume of private owners renting out their own vessel alongside professional fleets. Those are two entirely different products sharing a search results page.
A private owner's boat can be lovely and is often cheaper. It can also mean no base manager when the windlass fails on day three, no replacement boat, and a handover from someone who has done it four times rather than four hundred. Neither is wrong. You just need to know which one you are booking, and the listing does not always make it obvious.
How to tell: look for a named charter company in the listing, a fleet of similar boats from the same provider, and a formal check-in process with a stated deposit. If the listing reads like one person with one boat, it probably is.
GetMyBoat — Best for Looking, Careful When Booking
GetMyBoat's map-driven discovery is the best in the category. If you know you want to be somewhere in the Aegean but not where, dropping into the map and seeing what is available across bases beats any list-based interface.
Instant booking is the feature to treat with some care. Being able to confirm a boat in ninety seconds is convenient and it also removes the conversation in which you find out that the operator is unresponsive, that the boat is at a base forty minutes from where you thought, or that the advertised week runs Saturday to Saturday when your flights are Sunday.
We use it to find candidates and then contact the operator directly before committing.
SamBoat — Strong in France, Spain and Italy
SamBoat is worth a look specifically for the Western Mediterranean, where its inventory around the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia and the French coast is competitive with anything. Elsewhere it is a second stop rather than a first.
The interface is the weakest of the major platforms, which sounds trivial and is not, because comparing eleven boats badly presented takes twice as long as comparing eleven boats well presented.
What None of These Do
There is a line, somewhere around €25,000 a week, above which the platforms stop being the right tool.
Crewed yachts at that level are not sold by listing. The product is the match between a specific boat, a specific crew and a specific group, and that match is made by a broker who has been aboard, who knows that the captain is excellent with children or that the chef trained somewhere serious. The MYBA central agency system exists for exactly this, and there is no search box that replaces it.
You will occasionally see boats at that level on a platform. What you are usually seeing is a boat that has not filled its season through the normal channels, which is sometimes an opportunity and sometimes information.
The other thing the platforms do not do is tell you the total. Every one of them shows a charter fee, and every Mediterranean crewed charter carries an Advance Provisioning Allowance of 20 to 35% on top, plus fuel, berths, taxes and tips. We have written the full breakdown in Hidden Costs of Yacht Charter and What Is APA, because the gap between the headline and the bill is routinely 40%.
Does Booking Through a Platform Cost More?
Slightly, in the sense that the commission is real — typically 10 to 20% — but not in the way most people assume.
Most charter fleets price identically across every channel. They have to, because undercutting their own distribution partners is how a fleet loses distribution. So the boat that costs €6,200 on Boataround usually costs €6,200 direct, with the fleet absorbing the commission rather than you paying it.
What you get for that is comparison in one place, and a booking record with a third party who has some interest in resolving a dispute. What you lose is the direct relationship with the base, which matters more than it sounds when you want a late check-in or a specific boat from the fleet.
Our own habit is to search on the platforms and book direct where the fleet is one we know. That is a preference built on having done it a lot, not a rule.
The One Thing Worth Doing Before You Pay
Ask for the boat's name and hull identification number, the year it was built, and the year of the last antifoul.
Listings advertise a class — "45ft monohull" — and a class covers a 2013 boat with a tired mainsail and a 2023 boat with a bow thruster. Same search result, same price bracket, very different week. Any legitimate operator answers this in one email. The ones who do not are telling you something, and we go through the rest of the warning signs in How to Avoid Yacht Charter Scams.
If you would rather hand the comparison over, that is what we do — we search across the platforms and the fleets that are not on them, check the specific boats, and come back with three real options and the total cost of each. From £200 per request.