You are about to wire five or six figures to a company you found on the internet, for a yacht you have not seen, in a country you may never have visited. Done properly, with the right paperwork, this is one of the safest luxury purchases there is. Done casually, it is how charter fraud happens. I am a broker, and this is the exact diligence I would run on any broker, myself included.
How do you verify a yacht charter broker's credentials?
Look up every claimed membership in the official public registries, confirm the legal entity behind the website, and insist that money moves only through a signed charter agreement. Everything else in this article is detail on those three moves.
The registry check. The two associations you will see claimed most often both publish their member directories. MYBA, The Worldwide Yachting Association, lists corporate members at myba-association.com. IYBA, the International Yacht Brokers Association, lists members at iyba.org. A logo on a website is a design choice; a listing in the registry is a fact. If a claimed membership is not in the directory, you have learned everything you need to know, politely and in under two minutes.
The entity check. Ask for the company's registered legal name and jurisdiction, then find it in the official company registry. A serious brokerage volunteers this before you ask; ours is George Yachts Brokerage House LLC, and it is printed where anyone can check it. Be wary of websites with no legal entity anywhere on them: if things go wrong, you cannot sue a domain name.
The payment rule. A professional broker requests payment only via a signed charter agreement, with bank details provided directly by the company in writing. Never wire against instructions that arrive by email, messaging app or any unverified channel, even if the message looks like it came from your broker: invoice-interception fraud is the one genuinely common crime in this industry, and a thirty-second confirmation call on a number you found independently defeats it completely.
MYBA membership versus the MYBA contract: know which claim you are checking
This distinction confuses even experienced charterers, and dishonest marketing lives in the confusion. The MYBA Charter Agreement is a contract form: the Mediterranean standard for definitions, deposit handling, the APA and payment schedule, force majeure and dispute resolution, refined over four decades. Any professional broker can write your charter on it, and you should insist on it or a national equivalent. MYBA membership is a different thing entirely: a corporate membership in the association, held by the company and verifiable in the public directory. One claim is checked by reading your contract's title page. The other is checked in the registry. Check each in its own place.
Run this diligence on us, please
I publish this article knowing you will point it at me, which is rather the idea. George Yachts Brokerage House LLC is an IYBA Charter Active member: verify it at iyba.org, not on my say-so. Every charter we write uses the MYBA-standard Charter Agreement, and you will see that on the contract itself before you sign anything. Do not take even this paragraph on trust: the registries answer for every broker, ours included. Our credentials page lays out everything in one place, including the Forbes feature from May 2026, and my own page tells you who you would be dealing with.
Who actually regulates charter in Greece?
The Greek state, more than any private body. A commercial charter yacht in Greece holds a Greek charter licence, every charter is declared through the state's e-Charter Permission system before departure, and the port authorities enforce it. The licence is also what determines the yacht's certified VAT rate, which is why an honest Greek proposal never quotes one flat VAT number. If a broker cannot tell you whether the yacht is Greek-licensed and what its certified rate is, they have not read the paperwork on the boat they are selling you. The basics of how a properly run crewed charter works are worth twenty minutes of your time before any contract.
The red flags, from the broker's side of the desk
Pressure to wire today. A discount that dies at midnight. Bank details over WhatsApp. A refusal to contract on the MYBA form. No legal entity anywhere on the site. Memberships worn as logos but missing from the registries. And the quiet one: a price far below the market. Real Greek charter pricing is public, we publish it ourselves in the Greek Charter Index and in our full cost breakdown, so a quote dramatically under it is not a bargain, it is a subtraction you have not found yet: the licence, the insurance, the crew, or the yacht itself.
The two-minute version
Registry, entity, payment rule. Check the membership claims at myba-association.com and iyba.org, confirm the legal company, and move money only through a signed agreement. If you are comparing brokers for a Greek week, our honest comparison of the brokers working Greece names the serious houses, including our competitors. And if you want to test how a broker answers hard questions, ask me some. I answer personally, usually within hours, and I enjoy the ones that begin with 'prove it'.
