The Premise
Charter yacht search is mostly a price-and-photo grid. That's not how anyone actually chooses a £10,000 week. The buyer wants to know: relative to other boats in this country, of this type, of this size — is this a good one?
We rank every yacht in the catalogue against its peers, not against an absolute standard. A 2018 Bavaria 40 is judged against other 36–46ft sail boats in its country, not against a 2025 Lagoon 55. Both can score in the top 10% of their own peer group. That's how the score stays useful across the full price spectrum.
The Formula
What each signal captures
- Age, tier-modulated. A 12-year-old Bavaria is not a 12-year-old Outremer. Decay half-life is 3 years for budget volume builders, 6 for mid-tier, 12 for premium-volume (Bali, Excess, Leopard, Outremer). Specialty hulls (gulets, houseboats) get their own curve.
- Equipment, peer-relative. Only the 18 items operators would mention if present — A/C, Generator, Watermaker, Inverter, Solar, Ice maker, Hydraulic gangway, Bow thruster, Stand-up paddle, etc. Universally-fitted items (Bimini, Sprayhood, Refrigerator) are excluded — listing them tells us about the operator's data hygiene, not the boat.
- Build tier. Premium-volume (Bali, Excess, FP, Outremer, Leopard) sits above mid (Dufour, Hanse, mainstream Lagoons), which sits above budget-volume (Bavaria, Oceanis, Sun Odyssey). Heuristic, but it survives spot-checks.
- Value-for-money. Yacht price ÷ peer-group median. Capped to a ±2× band so a single anomaly can't swing the score. Currently dormant for ~85% of the fleet — see the caveats section below.
Peer Groups
A peer group is a slice of the catalogue narrow enough that an apples-to-apples comparison makes sense: country × kind × length-bucket.
Example: Croatia · Catamaran · 46–52ft contains 158 yachts. Within that slice, every yacht is z-scored against its peers. Top of that group means "best 46–52ft Croatian catamaran" — not "best catamaran globally". A 39ft monohull in Greece never competes with it, because no buyer is choosing between them.
The same boat — say a 2024 Dufour 40 — would be ranked once against its Croatian peers, and a separate Dufour 40 in Greece would be ranked against its Greek peers. The same hull can score differently in different markets, which is correct.
Live worked example — Croatia · Catamaran · 46–52ft
Pulled fresh from the index when this page loaded.
| # | Yacht | Builder | Year | Length | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loading peer group… | |||||
The Current #1, Walked Through
Top of the leaderboard right now is Sonea — a 2025 Leopard 50 catamaran in Croatia, scored 91. Here's why.
The story behind the number
Sonea is a 2025 hull — practically new — by Leopard, which sits in our top builder tier. Equipment-wise it's one of the most thoroughly-fitted boats in its peer group: 31 listed items including Ice maker, Watermaker, Inverter, Solar, Hydraulic gangway, Dishwasher, Washer/Dryer, Wi-Fi, BBQ, Teak cockpit, Underwater lights, Stand-up paddle.
It's also a single-yacht owner-operator. Of the 854 operators we index, 283 (33%) run a single yacht. That cohort holds only 3.8% of inventory — but it punches above its weight at the top of the leaderboard, because owner-operators tend to fit boats meticulously and care like an owner.
Where the Score is Honest About Itself
~85% of yachts don't yet have a confirmed peer-median price because of an upstream collector bug (date-range error — fixed 2026-05-21, backfill pending). Until the backfill completes, the score is driven by age × equipment × tier with value at neutral 0.5. Once the backfill lands, rankings will sharpen — expect boats that win on quality but lose on price-vs-peer to drop, and good-value peer-matchers to rise.
The 9,062 yachts indexed all come from Booking Manager (MMK). Operators on other platforms — Dream Yacht Charter, Navigare Yachting, Catamaran Charter — aren't here yet. A Nausys integration is on the roadmap; until then, leaderboards read as "best in the MMK catalogue", not "best in the world".
Equipment_score is based on what the operator chose to list in MMK. We exclude universally-fitted items so the score can't be gamed by listing every commonplace fitting, but we can't fully control for operator data hygiene. A genuinely well-equipped boat with a lazy listing will score lower than it should. Cross-checking with rating data is unreliable because only 48% of yachts have any reviews and 62% of those have ≤4. We're thinking about an operator-quality overlay; not built yet.
The current formula optimises for summer charter — heating drops out, A/C and shade matter. Shoulder-season buyers (Turkey October, Caribbean January) get a different equipment trade-off; a seasonal toggle is in the design but not yet shipped.
What Comes Next
- MMK collector backfill across all sailing areas (~3 hours sequential, MMK rate-limit bound) → value-for-money axis activates for the full fleet
- Nausys integration → the brand-name big-fleet operators enter the index
- Charter-type-aware variants (Bareboat / Skippered / Crewed) — weights shift based on what the buyer actually wants from the trip
- Operator-quality overlay based on SailChecker's own booking history
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