In 1980, chartering a yacht in Greece still meant knowing someone, or knowing someone who knew someone. Athenian Yachts started that year in Piraeus, importing sailboats from French shipyards into a market that had barely begun to imagine itself as an industry. Forty-six years later, the company runs one of the largest yacht sales, charter, and management operations in the country, still owned by the same family, under the same shareholder structure, two generations in.
The years in between trace much of Greek chartering’s own history. A dedicated charter department opened in 1985, the start of a long partnership with the Tzaras family that still runs the business today. In 1988 the company became the exclusive representative of Jeanneau in Greece, a relationship that has outlasted every other Jeanneau dealership in the country. The 1990s brought a pioneering financing scheme with Chios Bank, the Jeanneau “Etoile d’Or” award, and the Greek franchise of The Moorings, then the world’s largest charter company, held until 2012. Lagoon joined the portfolio in 2001, Bali in 2017, Excess and Fountaine Pajot in 2023–2024, and Aquila in 2026.
Few operators cover as much ground under one name: yacht sales with financing, a spare parts department, bareboat, skippered, and fully crewed charters, and full management from maintenance to insurance and legal matters. Since 2018 a dedicated Luxury Crewed Yacht department has managed around twenty premium vessels, and in 2024 the company moved into marina management with Benitses Marina in Corfu and a stake in Messolonghi Marina.
The numbers are not small. Around a hundred people work across the company, seventy in base management, two-thirds of them women. Athenian Yachts oversees roughly 170 vessels through fifteen bases around Greece, from Lavrio and Corfu to Rhodes, Skiathos, and Halkidiki. Its MySailMate app guides charter guests onboard, backed by internal systems for fleet monitoring, bookings, and charter data. The company also runs its own sailing school, UCaptain Skipper’s Academy. Groupe Beneteau named Athenian Yachts its top large-yacht dealer in Europe for 2025, and the charter side picked up a tourism award and a strong rating on SAMBOAT.
The company also supports causes beyond the water, from the Messolonghi anniversary to youth sailing clubs and ocean protection initiatives. Few family businesses in Greek tourism reach this size without selling a stake or folding into a larger group. That Athenian Yachts still points to two generations under the same ownership says something about how it means to approach the next stretch, with a fiftieth anniversary now only a few summers away.
