Burgess winter book runs 150pc ahead as the Med summer stays soft
A record book, and a winter running 150 per cent ahead
Burgess published its charter demand review on 24 July. The brokerage booked 5,970 charter days in 2025 against 4,432 in 2024, a rise of 35 per cent across its own managed fleet. The same report says bookings for winter 2026/27 are running 150 per cent ahead of where that season stood at this point in 2025. It is the strongest forward figure any of the large charter houses has put in public this year.
The two numbers measure different things and should be read separately. The charter-day count is settled history, a completed 2025 that turned out to be the largest book Burgess has recorded. The winter figure is a forward order book for a season that has barely opened for sale, and forward books can soften. What makes it worth an owner's attention is the direction, because a winter that is selling early is the opposite of the summer everyone has been describing.
The summer softened, the winter did not
Nothing in the Burgess report contradicts the weak Mediterranean season its own brokers have been describing since June. Jonathan Beckett, the Burgess chief executive, has put this Mediterranean summer as much as 30 per cent behind last year. Northrop and Johnson's data team measured the average booking lead time falling from 118 days in 2025 to 83 days in 2026, close to a third of the planning runway gone. Burgess says its spring was slowed by geopolitical caution before demand recovered, with summer bookings still ahead of last year.
What that describes is a market that has shifted its weight rather than lost it. The Mediterranean high season is crowded, expensive and now openly discounted, and clients are committing inside 90 days. The Caribbean winter is being booked early and in volume. An owner who reads only the summer headline will conclude the charter market is contracting and will price his winter weeks accordingly, which is the costly misreading available this year.
Where the growth sits, by size
The size brackets decide whether any of this applies to a particular boat. Burgess reports bookings up 26 per cent in the 40 to 50 metre segment and 23 per cent in the 50 to 60 metre segment, the two brackets carrying most of the commercially operated fleet. The average yacht chartered through the house measured 51.9 metres. The average charter ran 8.2 days.
That average length sets the operational shape of a profitable programme. Turnarounds come roughly every eight days, provisioning is continuous, and a crew works a compressed cycle from June to September. A yacht laid out for one family at anchor for a fortnight will earn less per available week than one configured for back-to-back eight-day trips, whatever the two ask per week. Owners weighing a build or a refit against charter income should design to the 8.2-day number, not the brochure fortnight.
Fifty-eight per cent of the book came back
Burgess reports that 58 per cent of its 2025 bookings came from returning clients. That figure turns charter from an acquisition business into a retention business, and it changes where an owner's money is best spent. Winning a first charter is expensive and largely the central agent's problem. Winning the second is close to free, and it depends on things the owner controls: crew continuity, a tender and toy package that matches what the guests actually asked for, and a yacht that is where it promised to be on the day.
The destination order in the report is the western Mediterranean first, the Caribbean second, the eastern Mediterranean third, the Adriatic fourth and the Bahamas fifth. Craig Cohen, a charter broker at the house, singles out Greece within that third place, pointing to a fleet that now holds enough large yachts to give a client real choice. An eastern Mediterranean season is a different proposition from Antibes to Porto Cervo, with longer legs, thinner shoreside support and a client who has usually chartered before.
What an owner does with this
The decision in front of most charter owners this month is whether to send the boat west for the winter. A transatlantic crossing has to be committed well before the winter book closes, and the Burgess forward number argues for committing rather than waiting to see how the autumn Mediterranean fills. The alternative is a yacht sitting in a Mediterranean berth through a season with no charter market in it, meeting crew and dockage out of capital.
The second decision is rate discipline, and the two seasons pull in opposite directions. Discounting a soft Mediterranean September protects utilisation at the cost of setting a reference price every comparable boat on the coast then has to meet. A winter book running 150 per cent ahead does not need that concession, and an owner who carries a summer discount across the Atlantic gives away margin the market was not asking him for. Price the two seasons as the separate markets the data says they have become.