Superyacht Marina Software: What Megayacht Berths Actually Need

A 60 metre yacht does not just need a slip. It needs a berth measured to the centimetre, three-phase shore power that can carry the load, a fresh water line that keeps up with a full provisioning run, a fuel arrangement, and a captain who expects the dock team to know all of this before the vessel arrives. The economics are different too. One megayacht berth can bill more in a month than a row of 12 metre slips bills in a season. When the stakes per vessel are that high, the tools you run the marina on stop being a back office convenience and start being part of the service itself.

Most marina software was built for a different boat. It assumes dozens of similar slips, modest utility draws, and owners who handle their own bookings. Superyacht and megayacht marinas break those assumptions. This guide walks through what large yacht operations actually require, and shows how the building blocks inside Marine OS (berth records, captain and customer files, metered utilities, service work, and documents) line up against those needs.

#What makes a superyacht marina different

Scale changes the job in ways that are easy to underestimate. A marina full of 10 metre boats can absorb a few mistakes. A marina hosting 40 metre to 90 metre vessels cannot. A berth assigned without checking draft against the tide, or a power pedestal that trips under load on a hot evening with the air conditioning running, becomes an incident the captain remembers and talks about. Reputation at this level travels fast through a small community of crew.

• Berths, not slips: each berth has real dimensions and a power and water rating that must be matched to the vessel before arrival.
• High value per contact: losing one megayacht to a competitor marina costs far more than losing a small boat, so service quality is the whole game.
• Crew as the daily relationship: you deal with captains, chief engineers, and bosuns day to day, while the owner or management company sits behind the contract.
• Heavy utilities: three-phase shore power, large water draws, and sometimes fuel and pump-out at volumes a small marina never sees.
• Provisioning and concierge: the dock team often coordinates deliveries, transport, repairs, and special requests that have nothing to do with the berth itself.
• Security and access control: tighter expectations around who comes and goes, plus ISPS obligations at facilities that handle international voyages.

#Berths with precise dimensions

The first thing a superyacht marina needs from its software is an honest model of the dock. Not a pretty map alone, but structured records that hold what each berth physically offers. Length overall it can take, beam it can accommodate alongside or stern-to, available depth at chart datum, and the shore power and water it provides. When a 60 metre yacht with a four metre draft asks for space next month, you should be able to filter to berths that fit on every dimension in seconds, rather than from memory or a wall chart.

In Marine OS, berth and slip records carry these dimensions as fields, and you can add custom fields for anything specific to your facility, such as Med-mooring versus alongside, fendering notes, or the number of power phases at the pedestal. The point is to make the constraint visible at the moment you assign a vessel, so the match is checked by the record rather than trusted to whoever happens to be on shift. You can see how the slip and berth records work here.

1. 1Capture each berth with length, beam, and depth, plus shore power amperage and phases and water supply.
2. 2Add custom fields for mooring type, fendering, and any local quirk that affects which vessels fit.
3. 3When a booking request comes in, filter berths by the vessel dimensions instead of relying on recall.
4. 4Record the assignment against the vessel and the dates so the berth shows as committed and nothing double books.

#Captains and crew as real contacts

Small marina software tends to assume one boat equals one owner equals one person you talk to and bill. At the superyacht end that model falls apart. The vessel might be owned through a company, managed by a separate firm, captained by someone on a rotation, and crewed by people who change between seasons. The person who calls about shore power is rarely the person who pays the invoice.

You need contact records that reflect that reality. The captain and chief engineer as the operational contacts, the owner or management company as the billing and contract party, and the vessel as the thing that links them together. Marine OS keeps customer, vessel, and captain records, so the day to day relationship with the crew and the formal relationship with the payer can both live on the same file without being confused. We wrote more about building a single trustworthy file per customer in this piece on the marina customer 360 record.

Getting this right has practical payoffs. Provisioning requests and dock notes go to the captain. Invoices and statements go to the management company. Arrival paperwork is tied to the vessel. When the same yacht returns under a new captain, the vessel history is intact and the new captain inherits a marina that already knows the boat. That continuity is part of what keeps high value clients coming back.

#Big metered utilities, billed accurately

Utility billing is where a lot of money quietly leaks at superyacht facilities. A 60 metre yacht running air conditioning, galley equipment, and systems off shore power can pull a load that dwarfs a whole pontoon of small boats. Charging a flat utility fee at that scale either undercharges the big draws and eats your margin, or overcharges the careful ones and irritates the people you least want to irritate.

Metered billing solves this by charging for what the vessel actually consumed. You record the meter reading at the pedestal, the system works the consumption against your rate, and the charge lands on the statement with the numbers behind it visible. For three-phase shore power and large water lines, that transparency matters: a captain or engineer will check a power bill, and a reading they can verify ends the argument before it starts. Marine OS supports metered utilities for exactly this reason, and we go deeper on the mechanics in our guide to metered electricity billing.

#Concierge, provisioning, and dock work

Berthing a megayacht is only the start of what the marina does for it. The dock team coordinates fuel, arranges pump-out, books contractors for repairs, takes in provisioning deliveries, sorts transport for guests, and handles the steady stream of special requests that come with high-value clients. Each of these is a job with an owner, a status, and often a cost. Treated casually, they live in someone's head or a chat thread and get dropped. Treated as work, they get done.

This is what service and work order tracking is for. Log the request against the vessel, assign it, track it to done, and attach any charge so it flows to the same statement as the berth and utilities. A provisioning run, a diver booking, a shore power fault, a guest transfer: all of them become trackable items rather than favours that depend on one person remembering. Marine OS handles service and work orders against the vessel and customer record, so the concierge side of the operation is as documented as the financial side.

• Provisioning deliveries received and signed for at the dock.
• Fuel and pump-out arrangements coordinated with suppliers.
• Repairs and contractor visits booked and tracked to completion.
• Guest transport, crew logistics, and one-off requests logged so nothing is forgotten.
• Any cost attached to the job and pushed onto the vessel statement.

#Documents, paperwork, and security

International yachts arrive with paperwork. Insurance certificates, registration, crew lists, port clearance, and contracts all need to be on file and findable. Keeping documents attached to the vessel and customer records means the dock office is not hunting through email when a port official or an auditor asks. Marine OS lets you store documents against the relevant records, so the arrival file for a given yacht sits where you would expect it.

Security deserves an honest note. Marinas that handle vessels on international voyages may fall under ISPS code obligations, and superyacht clients expect controlled access regardless. Software can help by keeping clean records of contacts, vessels, and visit dates, which supports access decisions and an audit trail. What software does not do is grant you an ISPS certification or replace a formal security programme. Those are facility, staffing, and procedural matters that sit with the marina and its security advisers. To be plain about where Marine OS stands today: specific ISPS workflows and security certification tooling are out of scope, and we would point you to that as a direction rather than a feature that exists now. The records and documents you keep in the system support your programme, but the programme itself is yours to run.

#Premium billing that pulls it together

The reason all of this connects is the invoice. A megayacht statement is not one line. It is the berth for the period, the metered power and water, the fuel, the provisioning handling, the contractor jobs, and whatever concierge items ran during the stay. When the berth record, the utility readings, the service work, and the documents all hang off the same vessel and customer file, the statement assembles from real activity instead of being rebuilt by hand at month end. That accuracy is worth a great deal when a single bill can run high and the payer is a management company that checks every figure.

If a thread runs through this whole guide, it is that the high end of the market rewards precision and continuity. The berth that fits on every dimension, the captain who is recognised, the power bill that survives scrutiny, the request that gets done: these are not separate features, they are one connected record of how you serve a vessel. Tools that keep that record together let a small dock team deliver service that feels bespoke.

You can compare plans on the pricing page (flat tiers, no per-slip surcharge), look closer at berth and slip records, or read how operators in one busy region think about this in our Mediterranean marina software guide. Every Marine OS plan starts with a seven day free trial and no credit card.