We measured our own fleet. On 130 of 155 yachts, the name was bigger than the boat.

Dubai sells yachts by class, not by length. We audited every yacht we charter and published both numbers on every listing — including the ones that made us look worse.

Dubai · audit of 155 yachts, 2026-08-31

The number in the name is a category, not a measurement

A charter listing in Dubai almost never states the length of the hull. It states a class — 90 ft, 130 ft, 240 ft — and the class is a round bracket the boat is sold in, the way a car is sold as a mid-size rather than by its wheelbase.

That is not, by itself, dishonest. It becomes a problem at the moment of payment, because the price is quoted per hour and the customer compares two round numbers as if they described the same thing. A boat sold as 130 ft and a boat sold as 130 ft can differ by more than twenty feet of deck.

What the audit found

We compared the catalogue name of every yacht in our fleet against the measured hull length recorded for it. Of 155 yachts, 130 carried a catalogue name larger than the hull, 22 matched exactly, and 3 were listed smaller than they actually are.

The median gap across the whole fleet was 5 feet. Among the overstated boats the median was 6 feet, and the widest single gap was 30 feet.

These are our own listings. We were doing the thing we would have complained about.

The five widest gaps in our own catalogue

Yacht ID	Sold as	Hull	Gap
110rs	140 ft	110 ft	+30 ft
140EY	150 ft	122 ft	+28 ft
250my	275 ft	250 ft	+25 ft
105yb	130 ft	105 ft	+25 ft
107N	130 ft	107 ft	+23 ft

A yacht's code is not its length either

A reasonable shortcut is to read the length out of the boat's identifier. It does not work. Across 203 vessels we found 63 where the code and the measured hull disagree: 140EY is 122 feet, 53sw is 62, 111rs is 135.

The identifier is an identifier. Anyone quoting it as a specification is quoting a filing reference.

What we changed

Every yacht page and every card now shows two numbers: the class the yacht is sold as, and the hull length it actually has. Where they differ, the difference is visible before the price is.

We did not quietly re-label the fleet to make the gap disappear. The class names stay, because that is how the market searches and compares. The measurement sits next to them.

How this was measured

Population: every yacht available for charter on this site at the date of the audit — 155 vessels. No sampling.
Catalogue size: the normalised size published for the yacht, i.e. the number that appears in its listing name.
Hull length: the length-in-feet field recorded against the vessel in our fleet database, sourced from the owner or the builder's specification.
Comparison: catalogue size minus hull length, per vessel. Medians rather than means, because a handful of very large yachts would otherwise dominate the average.
We make no claim about any other company's listings. We have not audited them.

Check us, then check anyone else

Open any yacht on this site. If the class and the hull differ, you will see both. Ask any other operator for the hull length in feet and the builder's model — an operator who has the boat can answer in one line.

Browse the fleet