They are easy. The infrastructure exists. The marina networks are developed. The provisioning is established. The regulatory frameworks for private vessels are navigated and familiar.
The Indian Ocean is none of these things.
It is also, for exactly these reasons, the most remarkable yacht charter environment on earth.
The Scale of the Opportunity
The Indian Ocean covers 70 million square kilometres. Its island groups — the Maldives, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Réunion, the Andamans, Lakshadweep, the Cocos Islands, Socotra — are spread across latitudes and contexts as varied as any ocean destination in the world.
The Seychelles archipelago alone — 115 islands, of which a significant proportion have no permanent human settlement — could occupy a superyacht programme for years without repetition.
What the Indian Ocean does not have is the superyacht infrastructure that the Mediterranean and Caribbean take for granted. The marinas are fewer, the provisioning chains are thinner, the regulatory frameworks for private vessels vary significantly between jurisdictions, and the operational planning required to run a programme here is substantially more demanding than in more developed charter environments.
This is precisely what makes it extraordinary.
The Seychelles: The Highest Concentration of Perfect Anchorages
Aldabra Atoll — a UNESCO World Heritage site of extraordinary ecological significance, accessible only by private vessel with specific permission — is the kind of anchorage that exists in the Seychelles and nowhere else in the accessible world.
La Digue. Silhouette. Aride. Desroches. These are not destinations with a brochure. They are anchorages discovered by the sailors who went looking for them, with no infrastructure between the boat and the horizon.
For a charter that is built around genuine remoteness — the authentic version, not the manufactured version that a resort calls remote because the nearest restaurant is a water taxi ride away — the Seychelles is the answer.
The Maldives: Beyond the Resort Atolls
The Maldives is becoming understood by the Indian charter market as a superyacht destination rather than just a resort one.
The distinction matters. A resort Maldives experience is extraordinary and constrained — one island, one beach, one reef. A superyacht Maldives programme is 1,200 islands, of which fewer than 200 have any permanent human settlement and fewer than a dozen have resort infrastructure.
The atolls of the far south — Addu, Huvadhu — are accessible only by vessel and see, in any given month, almost no private yacht traffic. The coral health here is a function of isolation.
At Hype Luxury, we build Indian Ocean programmes — Seychelles, Maldives, Andamans — for clients whose definition of escape has outgrown the destination the rest of the market is booking.
The ocean covers seven-tenths of the planet. Most of it is unvisited.
