Charter Catamarans: What Happens Between Two Turnarounds
In a charter base the unit of time is neither the month nor the week: it is the turnaround. A catamaran comes in on Saturday morning and leaves again on Saturday afternoon. In between, someone has to establish the condition of the boat, repair what needs repairing, restock, and hand the keys to a client who has paid full rate. Whatever is not dealt with in that window goes back out to sea for a week.
That is where the profitability of a charter fleet is decided, and it is precisely what the sector's tools cover least well. Booking platforms manage the commercial calendar; they say nothing about the actual technical state of the boats. Yet a boat that is booked is not the same thing as a boat that is available.
The essentials
The turnaround, not the calendar, is the unit of time for a charter fleet.
Booking software manages the commercial schedule, not the condition of the boats: the two subjects are distinct.
Check-out is a technical act before it is a commercial one: it is the only moment anyone really looks at the boat.
A disputed deposit is settled with time-stamped, photographed records, rarely with recollection.
The season concentrates the wear, not the calendar
A charter catamaran works hard from May to September and barely at all the rest of the year. Engines, windlass, watermaker and sanitary systems accumulate in one summer the use a privately owned boat sees in a full year. Scheduling maintenance on fixed dates therefore means doing it too early in winter and far too late in August, at the worst possible moment.
Tying each job to an hour counter, or to the number of turnarounds completed, aligns the plan with real use. The gain is not theoretical: it reads directly in the number of weeks a boat sits on the pontoon in peak season because a part was not ordered in time.
Check-out is a technical act
The end of a charter is the only moment when someone from the base steps aboard with fresh eyes. It is there, and nowhere else, that the real condition of the boat is established: what has broken, what is tiring, what is missing. Treating that moment as a mere handover formality means giving up the only systematic inspection of the year.
A standard return checklist, completed on the pontoon from a phone, changes the nature of the exercise. Every point checked leaves a record; every fault found creates a maintenance job attached to that boat, with its photograph. The link between observation and repair stops depending on what the base manager happened to remember.
Advertised availability against real availability
The booking calendar says a boat is free. It does not say that she is waiting on an injector, that her tender has a temperamental outboard, or that one cabin has an air-conditioning fault three clients have already complained about. The gap between those two pieces of information is paid for either in free upgrades or in poor reviews.
A fleet dashboard reconciles the two views: for each boat, overdue jobs, open alerts and parts on order. A base manager holding that picture on Saturday morning knows which boats can be promised and which must be moved, before the client is standing on the quay.
What booking software will not do
The confusion is common and worth clearing up. Charter booking platforms do well what they are designed for: the commercial calendar, contracts, payments, sometimes the client relationship. They do not carry the maintenance plan, the job history, the spare parts stock, or the statutory documents of each boat.
The two functions coexist rather than replace one another. The first fills the schedule; the second makes sure what has been sold can actually sail. That distinction is set out on the boat rental page, and taken further in our article on the marine CMMS.
Deposit disputes are settled with dates
Contested damage sets two accounts against each other: the client maintains the scratch was already there, the base maintains it was not. Without a time-stamped, photographed record at departure and return, the discussion rarely ends in the operator's favour, and almost never without commercial cost.
The same material serves well beyond the immediate dispute. A complete history per boat feeds the insurance negotiation, documents residual value at resale, and identifies the boat in the fleet that consistently costs more than the others. That last figure is often the first thing an operator discovers on leaving the spreadsheet behind.
Which leaves the cost of the tool, a question that reads differently in charter than elsewhere: set against the price of one lost charter week, a monthly subscription weighs little. BoatOn Book's professional plans run from 39 to 299 euros excluding tax per month per boat; a single turnaround saved across the season generally covers the year.
