A day on a private boat is the part of a Phuket holiday people remember, and the part they research least. Most travellers pick a company the way they pick a restaurant: open the map, sort by stars, book the first one with a nice photograph. For boats, that method tells you less than you would think.
The reason is in the numbers. A survey of 23 yacht charter companies based on the island, carried out in September 2026, found Google ratings running from 4.3 to 5.0. Eighteen of the 23 sit at 4.7 or higher. When almost everyone has a near-perfect score, the score stops separating anyone. Review counts vary far more, from 10 to 2,109, but a big number mostly tells you how long a company has been asking for reviews.
What does separate them is what each company is willing to put in writing on its own site.
Start with the licence. A business selling tours in Thailand needs a Tourism Authority of Thailand licence. Only 7 of the 23 print the number on their website; 16 do not. A missing number is not proof of a missing licence, but a printed one takes thirty seconds to check and tells you the company expects to be checked.
Then the price. Seven companies show a price in Thai baht for every boat they list. Nine show prices for part of the fleet, or a “from” figure only. Six quote only in dollars, euros or pounds, and one publishes no prices at all. A baht price on the page of a named boat is the closest thing this market has to a menu. Without it, the figure you receive by message depends on the day and on who is asking.
Then the small print. Twenty of the 23 publish what the charter includes: crew, fuel, lunch, snorkelling gear. Seventeen publish cancellation terms and seventeen publish how much deposit they take. Only 14 publish all three. If the weather turns, those two missing paragraphs are the whole conversation.
One more thing worth knowing is who runs the boat. Ten of the companies operate three or more boats themselves; eleven sell from a catalogue of boats run by others. Neither is wrong, and an agency can find you a boat an operator cannot, but it changes who answers when the plan changes at the pier.
Put together, the gap is wide. Scored out of 100 on eight published criteria, the 23 companies range from 26.2 to 92.4. Four score above 80 and nine score below 50, in a market where nearly all of them have glowing reviews.
None of this says whether the lunch is good or the crew is kind; no spreadsheet can. It tells you which questions are already answered before you write the first message, and which ones you still need to ask. The people behind the survey have published the full table, company by company, with the source of every figure. Ten minutes with it is a better start than ten minutes of scrolling through stars.
