Yacht charter Athens

Why the fleet is here

Greece has more chartered yachts than any other country in the Mediterranean, and the largest single concentration of them sits within twenty kilometres of central Athens. That is not an accident of marketing: it is the combination of a major international airport, four large marinas, and roughly two hundred inhabited islands within a week’s reach.

For a charterer the practical benefit of that depth is choice and price. In a market this large there is genuine competition at every size and every standard, shoulder-season rates are properly soft, and a yacht that is unavailable for your dates has four near-equivalents within a few hundred metres. Neither of those things is true in Monaco.

The corollary is that quality varies more here than it does on the Côte d’Azur. A large fleet includes a long tail. The difference between the top and the bottom of the Athens market for a similar advertised specification is very wide, and it shows up in crew, in maintenance and in the age of the soft furnishings rather than in the brochure.

Which marina you leave from

Four bases serve Athens and they are not interchangeable. Choosing the wrong one costs you half a day at each end of the week.

Marina	Character	Best for	To airport
Alimos	The largest in Greece; the volume base	Sail, bareboat, mid-market crewed	35 min
Zea (Pasalimani)	Piraeus, urban, well-served	Crewed motor yachts, provisioning	45 min
Flisvos	Superyacht berths, Palaio Faliro	Above 35 m	40 min
Lavrio	Fifty km southeast, closest to the Cyclades	Cyclades weeks, saving a leg	35 min

Lavrio deserves the emphasis. It sits on the eastern side of Attica, which puts it thirty to forty nautical miles closer to Kea, Kythnos and the western Cyclades than the Saronic marinas are. If the week is pointed at the Cyclades, leaving from Lavrio converts a long first day into a short one and gives you an extra island.

If the week is pointed at the Saronic — Aegina, Poros, Hydra, Spetses — then Alimos or Zea is correct and Lavrio is a mistake.

The meltemi, and what it does to a week

The meltemi is a dry northerly that blows down the Aegean through the summer, strongest in July and August, typically force four to six and not rarely seven in the channels between the Cyclades. It is the single most important planning fact about chartering in Greece, and it is almost never mentioned in charter marketing.

It is not dangerous weather for a competent crew on a well-found yacht. It is, however, weather that makes certain days uncomfortable and certain anchorages untenable, and it is the reason a Cyclades week in August is a genuinely different holiday from a Cyclades week in June.

What it means in practice

• Plan the route north into the wind at the start of the week and run back down with it. Beating home on the last two days against a force six is how a good week ends badly.
• Expect one or two days where the sensible answer is to stay put. Build them in rather than discovering them.
• Choose the boat for the wind, not against it. A heavier displacement hull, sail or power, is markedly more comfortable than a light planing boat in a Cyclades chop.
• The Saronic Gulf is substantially sheltered from all of this. If the party includes anyone uneasy at sea, that is where the week should go.

June and September are the answer for anyone with flexible dates. The meltemi is present but moderate, the water is warm from late June onwards, and the islands are habitable in a way that August does not quite manage.

Two routes, and how to choose

The Saronic — sheltered, short hops, food

Aegina, Poros, Hydra, Spetses and the eastern Peloponnese coast. Legs of two to four hours, protected water, a genuinely good restaurant every evening, and Hydra — which has no cars at all — as the set piece. This is the right week for families, for first charters, for mixed groups and for anyone who would rather be at dinner than on passage. It is also reliably fine in August, when the Cyclades are not.

The Cyclades — the postcard, at a price

Kea, Kythnos, Serifos, Sifnos, Paros, Naxos, Mykonos, Santorini. Longer legs, whitewashed villages, better beaches, and the meltemi. Santorini in particular is a poor yacht destination despite being the famous one: the caldera is too deep to anchor comfortably and the moorings are exposed. Go for Sifnos and Naxos instead, and see Santorini by ferry another year.

Greek charter law, in plain terms

Greece regulates charter more actively than most Mediterranean countries, and the rules affect what you can book rather than merely how it is paid for.

A yacht chartering commercially in Greek waters must hold a Greek professional charter licence and carry a crew list lodged with the port authority. Non-EU flagged yachts are permitted to charter here only above a length threshold and under specific conditions; below it, expect an EU flag, in practice usually Greek or Maltese. If a broker offers you a small non-EU flagged boat for a Greek charter, ask to see the licence.

There is a cruising tax, TEPAI, levied on leisure vessels in Greek waters and calculated by length and period. On a crewed charter it is the operator’s responsibility and is normally already inside the price; on a bareboat it may not be. Ask.

VAT applies to the charter fee, at a rate that depends on the itinerary and on how much of it falls outside Greek territorial waters. It should be quoted as a separate line and confirmed in the contract rather than described vaguely as “included”.

What it costs

Greece is the best value of the serious Mediterranean charter markets, and the gap against the French Riviera for an equivalent yacht is large — frequently thirty to forty per cent.

The Advance Provisioning Allowance runs at the conventional twenty-five to thirty per cent. Greek berthing is cheap by Mediterranean standards and food ashore is cheaper still, so the APA here tends to be genuinely reconciled with money returned, which is not universally the case elsewhere.

The one line that can move sharply is fuel, and it moves with the wind. A week of motoring into a meltemi on a heavy displacement yacht burns considerably more than the same week in settled June conditions. This is another argument for the sheltered route if the budget is fixed.

Questions