APA Explained: What It Covers and What It Runs At

The float covers what the yacht consumes while you are aboard: fuel for the yacht and her tender, food and drink, berths in the marinas you stop at, and the local fees the captain settles on your behalf. Fuel and berths are usually the two largest lines in it.

It is spent, not charged. The captain keeps the receipts, you are given an itemised account at the end of the charter, and whatever has not been spent comes back to you. On a charter that runs the float down early, the captain will ask you to top it up rather than cut the cruising short.

Across 32 destinations the median APA runs from 20% to 35% of the charter fee.

Each figure is the median of the APA percentages the yachts listed in that destination publish, recomputed every night from the same fleet the destination hub lists. A destination whose yachts publish no APA figure is left out of the table rather than given a market average, which is why the list is shorter than our destination list.

Every figure on this page is read from the same nightly data our destination pages use. Nothing here is a market average or a rule of thumb, and where a destination publishes no figure it is left out rather than filled in.

How charter pricing works, in full →