Your first superyacht charter. The things everybody assumes you already know.

A crewed charter puts you aboard a private yacht with her own captain and crew for an agreed period, almost always a week, running from a port you choose to a port you agree. You are not sharing her with anybody, there is no fixed route, and the schedule is yours to change within what the sea, the weather and the port authorities allow. That combination of a private house, a professional crew and a moving address is the thing people fall in love with, and it is also why the arrangements are unlike anything else in travel.

The crew are the part that surprises first-timers most. On a yacht of any size there will be a captain, deck crew, engineers, interior crew and a chef, often one person for every guest or close to it. They live aboard, they have been doing this for years, and they are remarkably good at being present and invisible in the right proportions. Your job is not to manage them; it is to tell them clearly what you like, once, in writing, before you arrive.

Odyssey arranges yacht charters and the cars that meet you at either end. The yacht is run by her own captain and management, which is the correct arrangement and worth understanding from the outset: when we say we will confirm something, we mean we will get the answer from the people who own the decision.

Almost every charter yacht in the world sleeps a maximum of twelve guests, whatever her size. A hundred metre yacht with room for thirty will still take twelve. The reason is international maritime law: under the safety conventions, a vessel carrying more than twelve passengers is no longer a yacht but a passenger ship, and passenger ships are held to a wholly different standard of construction, fire protection, life-saving equipment, stability, crewing and survey. Building or converting a yacht to that standard is enormously expensive, so owners simply do not.

A small number of yachts are built or certified to carry more, under the passenger yacht rules, and they are rare, expensive and specified as such. If somebody offers you a charter for eighteen, ask on what basis before you get excited, because the usual explanation is that the extra six are day guests rather than people who will sleep aboard.

Day guests are the practical answer to a party larger than twelve, and they are perfectly normal: more people may come aboard while the yacht is alongside or at anchor within the rules that apply where she is, and go ashore again in the evening. Plan it in advance with the captain rather than announcing it on the day. If the whole party needs beds, the honest options are two yachts, a villa with a day charter alongside it, or a different kind of holiday.

You will be asked what you would like to see, and a draft itinerary will come back. Treat it as a plan of intent rather than a timetable. The captain will change it during the week for wind, sea state and berth availability, and that is a feature rather than a failure: the whole advantage of a yacht is being able to move to where the weather is better on the morning it matters.

What is worth fixing in advance is the shape rather than the stops. How much of the week is passage and how much is at anchor. Whether you want a town most evenings or almost none. Whether there is a fixed commitment the yacht must be somewhere specific for: a dinner ashore, a birthday, a race weekend. And where the charter must end, because the redelivery point is a contractual matter rather than a preference.

The classic first charters are a week on the French Riviera between Saint-Tropez and the Italian border, the Balearics out of Palma or Ibiza, the Amalfi coast and the Aeolians, or the Caribbean in winter out of Antigua or St Barths. If your week includes an event, say so at the brief stage: Monaco Grand Prix week and the Monaco Yacht Show are berth problems rather than yacht problems, and they are solved in a different order.