Charter vs Hotel vs Airbnb Cost

The charter side is built exactly like our budget calculator: we take every verified weekly pricing band we hold for the country you pick, fall back to the region's bands (and, if a region publishes nothing, to the boats that charter there), scale the weekly figure by your nights, and cap the base at $80,000. On top we add the lines a crewed charter actually carries — a hired skipper budgeted as the larger of $200 per night or 12% of base, an APA provisioning allowance at 25% of base (the midpoint of the operator 20–30% range), and cleaning and transit at 4% of base. That single all-in figure is then divided by your party size to give a per-head number.

The hotel side is deliberately different. We hold no hotel pricing data, so we do not pretend to. Instead the page starts from a clearly-labelled benchmark table of typical shoulder-season room rates by region and star tier, and hands you an editable "your hotel rate" box. Enter the rate you are actually being quoted and the whole comparison re-runs around your real number. Rooms are then derived from your group type: families get one room per couple plus one extra for an odd adult and one per two children; friends share one room per two people; a couple needs one; corporate groups are priced at single occupancy, one room per adult; and multi-generation groups get one room per couple. Multiply rooms by nights by the nightly rate and you have the hotel total.

Finally we compare the two per-head figures. The bar chart flips colour when the cheaper option is not the charter, so you can see at a glance which way the maths is pointing for your exact group — and the break-even line tells you the group size at which the rooms start to cost more than the yacht.

The radar scores five things that decide whether a week away actually feels good. Privacy is about having your own space — a charter gives every couple a cabin and the whole boat to yourselves, while a hotel gives you one locked door and a shared corridor. Flexibility is control over your schedule: with a charter you decide where you wake up, when you eat and what you do; a hotel fixes you to one location and its timetable.

Experience covers the things you can only do on the water — sailing, snorkelling straight off the transom, island-hopping to a new bay every day. Food is where the hotel side wins: restaurants, bars and room service are simply outside a boat's day-to-day reach, even with a great crew. And value is the pure cost-per-head reading, which is why it moves opposite to the experience axes for the two options.

Your group type sets the starting profile — a family of four and a group of friends do not value the same things — and then the priorities you tick each add a point to that axis, capped at five. Tick privacy, flexibility and experience and the radar tilts hard toward charter; tick food and value and it tilts back.

Each polygon is one option's fit profile: the further a corner reaches from the centre, the stronger that option is on that axis. The solid teal shape is the charter and the dashed blue shape is the hotel. Where the teal outline sits outside the blue, charter scores higher on that dimension; where the blue is outside, the hotel does.

Do not read the area of the shape as a cost or a verdict — the radar is about fit, not price. A charter can look large on the radar and still be more expensive per head, which is exactly the trade-off this page is here to make explicit. The numbers beside the chart give the exact 0–5 score on each axis, and the line beneath shows the priority-weighted average for each option using only the axes you chose.