The initiative with the survey stems from problems that many owners, including Germans, sometimes have when chartering in other European countries. Recently, for example, there have been complications with the newer check-card recreational boating licences in Greece and, in some cases, Italy. Some charter companies did not accept the pleasure craft licences because they did not always explicitly state that you are also permitted to operate sailing boats. In fact, almost all EU member states have signed an agreement that the minimum licence required in the customer's country of origin is also recognised in the holiday destination, so that precisely such problems do not occur.
Although many customers also have the SKS or higher licences, with which the difficulties do not arise, there is always stress at the bases with pleasure craft licences, in the worst case only on the day of handover. Then some fleet operators don't want to hand over the boat because the skipper is supposedly not qualified to drive the boat. There have been cases where the problems could only be solved by hiring an expensive professional skipper for the trip at short notice.
However, southern European fleet operators actually have the most problems with licences from other member states that are only issued in the national language or similar. YACHT experienced an exemplary case of this a few years ago: there were considerable problems at a charter base in Athens because a Russian flotilla of around 15 skippers presented a wide variety of licences at check-in, most of which were only issued in Russian. The harbour office did not accept them because there was no international translation. When the base arranged this at its own expense, it turned out that some of the licences were actually for agricultural machinery or forklift trucks. After a lot of shouting, the whole thing was only resolved when other sailors with real sailing licences agreed to skipper. Meanwhile, the queue of annoyed skippers from EU countries dampened the mood at the base.
Survey should provide clarity
In order to solve such problems, the European Boating Industry Association (EBI) has drawn the EU's attention to this and is asking for a solution by striving for a binding harmonisation of driving licence recognition across the EU. To this end, a survey is currently being carried out among the member companies of European charter companies and among skippers to find out whether and what problems they have experienced on their charter trips abroad in recent years. The aim is to prove to the EU authorities that the problem is current and requires regulation similar to that for car driving licences. However, it is doubtful that this will lead to an initiative for a standardised driving licence across Europe, but it is not out of the question in the long term.
For the EBI, the Association of German Yacht Charter Companies (VDC) supports harmonisation and asks customers and member companies to take part in the survey. This can be done via the following Link to the EU survey. After initial criticism that it was too extensive with over 30 questions, it has now been revised and shortened.
