Yacht Charter Provisioning Costs and the Preference Sheet

You have agreed the charter fee, signed the contract and paid the advance provisioning allowance without much thought. Then, midway through the week, the captain mentions the APA is running low and asks for a top-up — and you realise you never understood what the fund was actually paying for, how a case of the wine you casually named on the preference sheet became a four-figure line, or why a ‘full’ boat still needs thousands more to keep the galley and tanks supplied.

What provisioning is, and where it sits in the money

On a fully crewed yacht charter, the fee you negotiate covers the vessel and her crew for the period — nothing more. Consumables are handled separately through the Advance Provisioning Allowance, or APA: a running fund, customarily 25 to 35 per cent of the charter fee, that you pay before departure and the captain spends on your behalf. Provisioning — the food, wine, spirits, soft drinks and galley supplies loaded aboard for your week — is the single largest and most visible call on that fund.

It sits alongside fuel, berthing, port and pilot fees, laundry and communications, all of which are drawn from the same APA. That is the first thing to understand: provisioning is not a fixed menu price you agree in advance, but an estimate the crew works to, funded from money you have already placed with them and reconciled against real receipts at the end. The charter contract — whether MYBA or CYBA form — sets the mechanism; the preference sheet sets the content. Getting both right is what keeps the final bill free of surprises.

The distinction trips up first-time charterers because it inverts the logic of a hotel or a restaurant, where the headline price broadly covers what you consume. Here the fee is the floor, not the ceiling, and the APA is where the week's real living costs land. A useful mental model is to treat the charter fee as rent on a beautifully staffed floating villa, and the APA as the household account from which the staff buy everything the household then uses — provisioning foremost among it. Understood that way, the fund stops feeling like a hidden extra and starts behaving like exactly what it is: your money, spent to your instruction, and returned in full where it is not.

The preference sheet: how the crew learns what you want

The preference sheet is the questionnaire the crew send once the charter is confirmed. It is not a formality — it is the single document that translates your tastes into a shopping list, and the chef and interior team build the entire provisioning run around it. Completed carelessly, it produces guesswork and either waste or shortfall; completed with care, it lets the crew buy precisely and spend your fund well.

• Dietary detail: allergies, intolerances, vegetarian or vegan guests, religious requirements and children's needs — the non-negotiable facts the chef must plan around.
• Food style and favourites: the cuisines you love, dishes to repeat, ingredients you dislike, and how formal or relaxed you want the table to be.
• Drinks and brands: named champagnes, spirits, wines by region or label, mixers, soft drinks and the coffee you actually drink each morning.
• Occasions: birthdays, anniversaries or a celebration dinner that warrants a rare bottle or a specific cake.

The more specific you are, the more accurately the crew provision — and the less of your APA disappears into approximations that miss the mark. A well-drawn preference sheet also protects the crew, who otherwise buy defensively, over-ordering to be sure they can meet any request you might spring on them mid-week. That caution is expensive, and it is your fund that pays for it. Treat the sheet as a briefing rather than a form: a paragraph on how you actually live — the long lazy lunches, the early risers who want proper coffee, the guest who cannot eat shellfish — is worth more to a good chef than a page of ticked boxes. Return it early, too, so the crew have time to source scarce items before you sail rather than scrambling in port at a premium.

What provisioning actually costs per guest, per day

There is no fixed tariff, because provisioning tracks your own tastes — a table drinking vintage champagne and eating lobster costs a multiple of one content with rosé and Mediterranean simple. As a working planning range, provisioning commonly falls between roughly €120 and €350 per guest per day, before the premium requests that can lift it well beyond. The table below gives indicative daily figures by charter tier to budget against — not quotes.

Read these as the food-and-beverage share of the APA alone. Fuel, berthing and other running costs draw on the same fund on top, which is why a healthy APA and an honest preference sheet matter together. Two variables move the figure most. The first is drink: a party that works through vintage champagne and fine wine can spend more on the cellar than on the kitchen, and the bar is where budgets most often overrun. The second is destination — provisioning in a well-supplied Riviera port differs sharply from an island where everything arrives by tender and carries a scarcity premium. Group composition matters too: children and lighter eaters pull the per-guest average down, while a table of enthusiastic diners and drinkers pushes it toward the upper band. Use the range to set expectations, then let the crew's estimate refine it against your actual sheet.

Premium requests: where the bill climbs fastest

The steepest movements in provisioning come not from volume but from specificity. A named vintage champagne, a case of a particular first-growth claret, out-of-season produce flown in, or a chef's ingredient that must be sourced from a single supplier will each carry a price far above the everyday equivalent — and in a charter destination, often with a mark-up for local scarcity and delivery.

None of this is a problem, provided it is anticipated. The failure mode is the casual line on a preference sheet — ‘we like good champagne’ — that the crew, wanting to please, interpret at the luxury end and buy by the case. If a rare bottle or a specific label genuinely matters, name it, state roughly how much you expect to drink, and ask the crew for an indicative cost before departure. Equally, if you would rather cap the wine budget, say so explicitly. The crew cannot read restraint into an open instruction, and it is your fund they are spending. Clarity here is worth more than any negotiation on the charter fee itself.

Sourcing adds a second layer of cost that clients rarely see. In a charter port, a single rare bottle or an out-of-season delicacy may have to be brought in specially, sometimes couriered from the mainland or held aside by a specialist supplier, and the crew pass that logistics cost through at cost. There is nothing improper in it — it is the true price of getting a particular thing to a particular anchorage on a particular day — but it explains why the same label can cost noticeably more afloat than ashore. The way to keep it comfortable is simply to decide in advance which indulgences genuinely matter to you and fund them deliberately, rather than discovering their weight only when the reconciliation lands.

APA reconciliation: how the fund is squared at the end

The APA is your money held on account, not a fee. The captain keeps a running tally of every disbursement — provisioning receipts, fuel, berthing, port charges — and is expected to show it. Good practice, and the norm on a well-run yacht, is a mid-charter update on how the fund is tracking and a full accounting at the end, with receipts, so you can see exactly where the money went.

Reconciliation then settles simply. If actual spend comes in below the APA you paid, the balance is returned to you; if consumption — a heavier bar bill, an unplanned long passage burning more fuel — exceeds it, the captain will ask for a top-up during the week rather than let the fund run dry. The mechanics are set out in your MYBA or CYBA contract. Two habits protect you: ask for the running total mid-week rather than waiting for the final envelope, and treat any refusal to itemise as a red flag. A properly managed APA is transparent by design.

It also helps to understand what the reconciliation cannot do. It settles the fund against receipts; it does not retroactively cap spending you authorised, however casually, along the way. If the bar ran hot because the instruction was open, the receipts will show it, and the fund will have been spent accordingly — the accounting is honest even when the total is higher than you hoped. This is precisely why the discipline belongs at the front of the charter, on the preference sheet and in the mid-week check-ins, rather than at the settlement table. Reconciliation is the moment the numbers are confirmed, not the moment they are decided. On a well-run yacht it should be the least eventful part of the week: a folder of receipts, a clear balance, and a refund or a modest top-up that matches what you already knew was coming.

Building a realistic food and beverage budget

Provisioning surprises are almost always budgeting failures, not crew failures. The remedy is to plan the food-and-beverage line deliberately, before you sign, rather than treating the APA as a single lump you hope will stretch. A few disciplines keep the week predictable.

• Separate the fund in your head: know that fuel and berthing draw on the same APA as provisioning, and budget the food-and-beverage share on top of them, not within them.
• Anchor to a per-guest figure: pick a realistic daily number from the table above for your style, multiply by guests and nights, and sanity-check the crew's estimate against it.
• Cost the premium items up front: ask for an indicative price on any named champagne, rare wine or luxury ingredient before departure.
• Agree how you will be updated: request a mid-charter APA statement so nothing is a shock at settlement.
• State your ceiling: if you want the bar or wine budget capped, put it in writing on the preference sheet.

It helps, too, to keep a modest contingency in mind rather than budgeting to the last euro. Weather can lengthen a passage and burn more fuel; a spontaneous shore dinner may not touch the galley at all; guests drink more on some nights than others. A fund planned with a little headroom absorbs that natural variation without a mid-week top-up conversation, and any surplus simply comes back to you at reconciliation. The point of the exercise is not to spend less — a charter is meant to be enjoyed generously — but to spend knowingly, so the figures at the end are the figures you chose.

Done this way, the final reconciliation confirms what you already expected. The preference sheet and the APA are not traps — they are the tools that let a good crew spend your money exactly as you would, and the charterers who master them are the ones who never think about the bill again once the week begins.