Palma. The one yachting city where the airport is twenty minutes from the passerelle.

Palma does two things at once, and understanding which one your trip belongs to explains most of what follows. Through the winter and early spring it is the refit capital of the western Mediterranean: yachts come into the STP yard and the technical berths in the commercial port, crews live ashore, and the waterfront is a construction site with very good weather. From late spring it becomes a charter base, and the same yachts move to Club de Mar, Puerto Portals, Port Adriano or out to Andratx with guests on board.

The three names that matter for a guest arrival are Club de Mar, STP and Puerto Portals. Club de Mar sits just west of the commercial port, close enough to the cathedral and the old town to walk, and it takes the largest charter yachts in the bay. STP is the yard, and while yachts do lie there between jobs it is not a place designed for guests to arrive at. Puerto Portals is twenty minutes west along the coast, smaller in the sizes it takes and much more of a destination in itself.

Around all of it is an airport that handles private aviation around the clock, a quarter of an hour from the water. A late arrival or an early departure is genuinely possible here, which is not true at Cannes Mandelieu or on the Costa Smeralda.

Every one of these marinas has controlled access to its pontoons and quays. The car reaches the head of the quay or the parking beside it, crew meet the luggage there, and the driver leaves rather than waits. Because the distances in Palma are short and the roads work, a driver going away and coming back is a genuinely small cost here, which is not true in Monaco or Porto Cervo.

If the yacht is lying at STP or on a technical berth in the commercial port, ask the captain where the guests should go. Yard access is controlled for safety rather than for privacy, and the sensible answer is very often that the yacht shifts to Club de Mar or meets you elsewhere for the start of the charter. That is a conversation to have a week ahead, not on the morning.

Tender pick-ups in the bay are straightforward and the captain will name the point. Further afield, anchoring in the Balearics is governed by the rules protecting the posidonia seagrass meadows, so where the yacht can lie is decided by the official seabed charts rather than by preference. That occasionally moves a pick-up point a mile from where you expected it, which matters only if nobody told the driver.

The Palma International Boat Show opens the Mediterranean season at the Moll Vell, below the cathedral, and is scheduled for 28 April to 1 May 2027. The Superyacht Cup Palma follows in June, with the 2027 edition scheduled for 23 to 26 June, and the bay's largest keelboat regatta runs at the end of July and into the first days of August. Each of them fills hotels, cars and berths, and each of them coincides with a period when the yard and the marinas are already busy.

July and August are the peak for everything else. Slots and parking at Palma airport are restricted through those months even though the field operates around the clock, so whether your aircraft can stay on the ground between the outbound and the return is a question for your operator, asked when the flight is arranged. If the answer is that it must reposition, that is normal for the Balearics in August and simply belongs in the plan. Spring and the second half of September have the same sea and roughly half the pressure. See Mallorca for how the rest of the island works.