Well, let's make some calculations based on a 100 to 130 feet yacht. Typically, when an owner is not on board the crew will work an average of 40 hours per week. However, during a charter, the typical working hours jump to roughly 16 hours per day for a whopping total of 112 hours per week excluding the long nights preparing the boat prior a charter.
On a private yacht, the salary is about 40% higher if we take an example, a chief stewardess will earn about $5000 on a charter yacht versus about $7000 on a private yacht. This salary spectrum mentioned is based on personal experience, the lowest pay chief stew I ever saw was $4500 while the highest was $9500 on a 105 ft yacht but generally speaking, the average was $7000 on private.
If you are a deckhand making $3700 per month it would be attractive to receive $3000 tips since you just raise your salary by 81% however your working hours have raised 180%. However, those numbers are not so attractive when we look at a captain's salary. The work still increases by 180% but the salary would only increase by 23% since captains have bigger salaries.
It seems that a charter yacht with the calculation above shall be actually paying the crew more on they monthly salary than a private yacht.
Even in the case of a private yacht, a good question during an interview is: How much use is the yacht going to get? I am coming from a liveaboard owner background here… Keep in mind that we are paid per month for 30 days of work so $3700 per month is $123 per day but if you manage to work 20 days per month then you will be making $187 per day.