The boat's ready to go, the trip is planned, two berths are still free. And now? Anyone who has ever looked for crew knows the feeling: It rarely fails for lack of interest. It fails because the right people don't find out you exist — and because the advert is missing the answers they need to make a decision.
This article shows where sailors actually search today, what belongs in a trip advert, what the ship's kitty realistically costs, and at what point a private trip legally becomes something else. That last point is the most frequently underestimated.
Where crew members really search today
Crew-finding platforms and sailing portals. This is where people search who have already decided they want to sail and are now comparing sailing areas, dates and boats. In the German-speaking world there are several established platforms for this — from pure hand-for-a-bunk exchanges to portals with commercial offers. The advantage: your offer stays findable, even weeks later, and can be filtered by date and sailing area. The disadvantage: you first need to be listed there.
Club forums. The ocean sailing club Trans-Ocean, founded in 1968 with around 5,000 members, runs its own crew exchange. Such forums have a small but experienced readership — good for demanding trips, deliveries and long passages, cumbersome for anything that needs to happen quickly.
Facebook groups. Quick, free and often surprisingly effective for last-minute gaps. But a post is buried in the feed after two days, no one can search specifically for your date, and there's no identity verification whatsoever. Incidentally, how large these groups really are cannot be reliably verified — Facebook releases no substantiated figures on this.
Notice boards in the harbour and word of mouth. Underestimated. If your sailing area is fixed and you're there anyway, the noticeboard in the harbourmaster's office fills a surprising number of berths. Just not predictably.
Your own website. Indispensable as a calling card, but it only reaches people who already know you. Anyone searching for "cabin charter Baltic July" won't land there.
The honest summary: those who regularly fill berths use several channels simultaneously. Those who only occasionally offer a trip mainly need that one place where people are actively searching.
What makes a good trip advert
An advert that generates enquiries answers the questions a crew member will ask anyway — before they have to ask them.
Sailing area and route. "Mediterranean" is not a sailing area. "From Lefkas through the Ionian Islands and back, with stops in Fiskardo and Kastos" is. When people read the route, they can picture their holiday.
Dates and duration. With dates, not "in summer". State departure and arrival days separately so nobody books their flight wrong.
The boat. Type, length, year built, number of berths and heads. Whether you share a cabin or not is the deciding question for many people.
Price and what's included. Berth price, and separately the kitty with a realistic estimate. A price without stating additional costs doesn't look cheaper, it looks dodgy.
How many are on board. Six crew on a 45-foot yacht is different from four. The number determines space, peace and watch rhythm — and anyone who states it has an advantage over all those who don't.
What you expect. Previous experience, watch system, participation on board. A trip with night watches is something different from a week of island-hopping — and both find their people if it's stated upfront.
Photos of the boat. Saloon, berth, cockpit. Everyone has sunsets. When people see the berth they'll be sleeping in, they're more likely to enquire.
Cabin charter, hand for a bunk or sail training — say it clearly
Most disappointed expectations on board arise not at sea, but when advertising. Three forms are regularly confused.
Sailing means: The guest pays for their berth and may participate, but doesn't have to. The skipper commands the vessel.
Hand for a bunk means: the guest contributes their labour — watches, including at night, manoeuvres, boat work — and gets the berth in return. Important, because it's constantly misunderstood: Only the bunk is free. Travel to and from the boat is paid by the crew member themselves, and their share of the ship's kitty as a rule too. In the scene the rule of thumb is that above about 20 euros per day or 150 euros per week you can't really call it hand for a bunk any more — that's not a regulation, but a widespread understanding. Traditionally the skipper is fed from the ship's kitty.
Sail training means: There is a learning objective, an instructor and usually an exam. Anyone who expects this and instead just comes along is rightly disappointed.
Write in the first two lines which of the three forms your trip is.
What the ship's kitty realistically costs
The ship's kitty is the most frequent point of conflict on board — almost always because no one named a figure beforehand. As a rough guide, in practice for a week-long trip in the Mediterranean about 250 to 350 euros per person is quoted, for provisions, diesel and harbour and anchoring fees. These are empirical values from specialist articles and from providers, not statistics — your sailing area may be well above or below.
Two items can be estimated well and help with the calculation: A berth costing under about 20 euros per night counts as cheap, in well-known marinas it quickly becomes several times that. And for the engine you can reckon with around 10 euros per engine hour. Anyone who writes these two figures in their advert and states how many harbour nights are planned saves themselves half of all follow-up questions.
At what point does cabin charter become commercial?
This is the point where most skippers go wrong — and the error is always the same. The common assumption is: as long as I don't make a profit, it stays private. That's not correct.
The Seeschifffahrts-Sportbootverordnung describes commercial use as deployment of a sports boat for sport and leisure purposes that "is directed at profit-making". The Berufsgenossenschaft Verkehr, the responsible authority, interprets this in its information circular as follows: what is meant are trips in exchange for payment — an intention to make a profit is expressly not required for this. As a further characteristic it states that trips are publicly offered to an indefinite group of people with a certain regularity and the boat is deployed with skipper in exchange for payment.
If a trip is considered commercial under this definition, quite a lot depends on it. Under German flag such a boat requires a safety certificate from eight metres hull length, and a crew certificate regardless of length — even for smaller boats. Responsibility then lies not with the Wasserstraßen- und Schifffahrtsamt but with the ship safety department of the BG Verkehr. What certificate of competence the skipper needs is specified in the crew certificate and depends on the area of operation; there is no blanket answer "you need licence X".
Two further points are important. First the number twelve: a sports boat is a vessel for at most twelve persons excluding crew. Above that, passenger ship law applies, an entirely different set of regulations. Second: you cannot escape the German requirements by sailing in Croatia or Greece. The regulation expressly covers commercial use abroad as well — for boats under German flag the requirements travel with you. If on the other hand you sail a charter yacht under a foreign flag, the law of the flag state applies.
Since 30 November 2024 there has additionally been the category of small craft for commercially used boats under 24 metres, with its own requirements and a mandatory safety briefing. Private sports boats are not affected by this.
And so where does the boundary lie between cost sharing and payment? Honest answer: none of the official sources say. There is no amount at which a shared boat fund becomes remuneration, and hand for a bunk with a boat fund is not explicitly regulated anywhere. Precisely because of this, the question should not be ignored. Binding information is provided by the Ship Safety Department of the BG Verkehr in Hamburg. This article does not replace legal advice.
And what does the insurer say?
Insurance law and ship safety law are two different questions. Anyone who conflates them is lulled into a false sense of security — the answer to one question does not apply to the other.
On the insurance side, the position is relatively clear. A major yacht insurer describes the boundary as follows: a commercial policy becomes necessary if the skipper receives commercial benefit, remuneration or any other pecuniary advantage from the activity. Expressly not not included is when someone leads a private trip with friends and the crew members merely cover the costs — mentioned are flights, meals and accommodation. In this reading, club trips also remain private. Crew members are usually covered under a skipper liability policy.
The second, equally important statement comes from other insurers: hire and commercial use are only covered if expressly stated in the insurance policy. And for cabin charter, accidents involving charterers are not automatically covered under a standard yacht liability policy — there are separate guest liability and guest accident policies for this purpose.
The practical advice from this is unspectacular but effective: a phone call to your own insurer before the first paying guest comes aboard. Clarifying this question beforehand is considerably more pleasant than having it asked in the event of a claim.
The five most common mistakes
No price. "Price on request" costs more enquiries than it brings. Anyone comparing will simply skip your offer.
No photos of the boat. An advert without pictures is skimmed over, no matter how good the text is.
Unclear expectations of the crew. If it only becomes clear on board that night watches are part of it, the mood is gone — and so is the rating.
Advertised too late. There are no reliable figures on booking lead times for cabin charter berths. For yacht charter, a major provider reports from its own booking data an average lead time of around 141 days, over 165 days for German customers. This is an indicator, not evidence for the cabin charter market — but it fits the experience that holiday trips are planned months in advance. Last-minute berths fill up too, but only if they are clearly identifiable as last-minute offers.
Responded too slowly. Enquiries usually go to several boats at the same time. Anyone who takes two days is out. A two-liner the same evening is perfectly sufficient.
Before casting off: clarify expectations
A good advert brings people aboard. Whether the trip succeeds is decided in the days beforehand. A brief written agreement that all participants go through once has proved its worth: vessel details and insurance, route and timetable with weather buffer, crew size and berths, what collaboration is expected, the watch system, amount and composition of the boat fund, safety equipment and who is responsible for which lifejacket, rules for cancellation and abandonment, and conduct rules regarding alcohol, for example. In practice, a photo of the signed page on both phones suffices.
Then comes the safety briefing before departure — assign lifejackets to individuals, establish lifebelt rules, allocate man-overboard roles, show fire extinguishers, bilge pumps, seacocks, radio and signalling equipment, explain the gas system. Sensibly, it is noted in the logbook. This is not a formality: the skipper bears full responsibility on board, for vessel and crew, and is liable even when a situation was caused by a crew member.
And one point that experienced skippers confirm and which surprises many: conflicts on board are normal and even have a typical timing. The psychologist Renate Degner, who also works on psychology on board for the cruising division of the Deutscher Segler-Verband, applies the well-known five-phase model of group formation to the trip: after the cautious feeling-out of the first few days, disagreements are aired from at least the third day onwards, before roles settle in. Anyone who knows this does not take it personally — and talks about it sooner.
Advertise trips on Törnfinder
Törnfinder is a portal for sailing trips, sailing courses and seminars. Advertising is via a monthly or annual subscription: you pay for the period, not per booking — no commission is charged, and the number of your trips is not limited.
Each trip can be assigned to categories so that it is found by sailing area, trip type and date. Enquiries go directly to you, with no intermediary. And you get your own provider page where all your trips are listed together — with profile photo, profile and link to your own website.
What this costs is stated on the page Pricing for providers. If you want to get started straight away, go via the Registration.
And the most important advice at the end, quite regardless of where you advertise: write the advert the way you would want to read it yourself if you were looking for a berth. Concrete, honest, with price and with pictures. The rest will follow.
