Four in five charter clients cannot use a search filter

Roughly four in five yacht charter clients cannot use a search filter. Jennifer Kerum, co-founder of Anchor Croatia, a luxury charter brokerage on the Adriatic, estimates that about eighty percent of her clients have to be taught the fundamentals of chartering before they can specify anything — and that teaching is unpaid, front-loaded, and often spent on an inquiry that never converts.

Four platforms serve this market. None of them is built for the client she describes.

What does a first-time charter client actually ask for?

A boat they saw on television, with no sense of what it costs. Kerum described the recurring opening conversation in an Artificial Reality interview:

"Have you seen Below Deck? Everybody loves Below Deck. And when they call for a yacht, they all want that boat. They go, 'Hello, Jennifer, I would like this boat, I like this boat from Below Deck.' I'm like, great, what's your budget?"

Then the gap opens:

"Someone goes, 'I need a jacuzzi, I need five staff, I need everything, I want to be below deck, I need this and this and this,' and I'm like, okay, great — two hundred and fifty thousand. And they're like, 'No, no, no, I want maybe eight thousand.' I'm like, so a sailboat."

A person in that conversation cannot operate a filter interface, because a filter assumes you already know which filters apply.

What does the unpaid teaching cost a brokerage?

Expert broker time, spent before any commitment exists, on inquiries that may never convert. Kerum's account of the scale:

"We almost spend so much time in the process of teaching the clients what it is to yacht. And that's not for every client, but I would say it's for about eighty percent of our clients."

"It's really time consuming, and then not all reservations come through. So you've spent maybe a month and a half talking with a client."

That is the cost line most charter software does not touch.

Which platforms exist, and what do they solve?

Four, identified by Artificial Reality as apparently relevant to this problem. Not ranked, not independently tested, and not named or endorsed by the operator.

SEARADAR — Online booking combined with concierge service across roughly 20,000 vessels in Croatia, Greece and Italy, turning a client brief into matched boat options. Seed stage, approximately €600K, based in Vilnius. The closest thing here to a brief-to-options workflow, but skipper-focused rather than luxury crewed.

BOATSCRIBE — Athens-based metasearch across roughly 36,000 yachts, comparing price and availability, with AI-powered personalized recommendations and B2B automation described as on the roadmap. Pre-seed, €250K+, September 2025. Directionally right; confirm what ships today.

Yasido — Booking platform covering 30,000+ boats across 2,000+ destinations, with filtering by destination, dates, boat type, guest count and amenities, plus personalized support. Early stage, based in Bulgaria. Solves search, not the unspecified client.

Floatist — Charter fleet operations across roughly 600 yachts, including Croatian fleets: check-in, scheduling, paperwork and maintenance. Seed, approximately €500K. This is the operations side, after a booking already exists.

Nothing in that set turns a natural-language description of a desired experience into a shortlist.

What is the difference between charter search and charter intake?

Yacht charter intake and matching software captures what a prospective client wants — occasion, party size, budget, destination and desired experience — at the point of first contact, then translates it into suitable yacht, destination and season options before a broker joins the conversation.

Marketplaces and metasearch are inventory-first: they assume you already know roughly what you want. Charter management software runs the operation after a booking exists. Intake sits before both, and its job is to work with a client who cannot yet describe what they are buying.

How do you tell which one you are being sold?

Run these five checks before you sign anything:

• Test with a real unspecified client. Give the platform the Below Deck scenario — television expectations, an eight-thousand budget — and see whether anything useful comes back. That single test separates the categories.
• Check coverage in your own cruising grounds. Inventory counts are national or global; what matters is boats you would actually recommend in the waters you sell.
• Ask what happens with crewed charter. Where crew quality determines the experience, vessel-specification matching produces confident wrong answers.
• Ask how the handoff works. If the tool cannot pass a qualified brief to a broker, it has moved the work rather than removed it.
• Ask what data you get back. Intake produces a record of what clients ask for. That is a retention and merchandising asset, and it should be yours.

What should a broker do this week?

Decide whether you are buying search or intake before you take a demo. Three of the four platforms above are search, and search is the wrong purchase when four in five of your inquiries arrive unable to describe what they want. If nothing on the market handles that client, the cheaper move is to put the qualifying questions on your own website ahead of the first call — which is exactly what Kerum is doing.

Where this comes from

S1E2: How a luxury yacht company uses AI without losing the personal touch — the full interview with Jennifer Kerum. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.