Yachts For Kings operates under six editorial commitments, written down in 2025 before the site launched and not amended since. The first is that rankings are never changed for money. The second is that every best-of guide names what we passed on and why. The third is that any page containing an affiliate or referral link discloses that fact at the top. The remaining three sit below. The commitments are the product. A page that violates one of them should not be on the site, and we want the reader correction if it is.
The six commitments
One. Rankings are not for sale. No yacht, broker, builder, charter management company, or shipyard has been moved up a ranking in exchange for money. Two sponsorship deals have been turned down in our first six months because the partner expected a ranking move. We expect to turn down more.
Two. Every best-of names what we passed on. A review that names no failures is not a review. Every best-of guide on this site has a "passed on" section. Every broker review has a "passed on" section. We do not run lists where everyone is great.
Three. Disclosure at the top of every monetized page. Any page that links to a broker, an aggregator, a shipyard, or any partner with a commercial relationship to us carries the standard disclosure block at the top. The disclosure reads, "This page contains affiliate and referral links. If you charter, book, or buy through them we earn a referral fee, paid by the broker or platform, at no cost to you. We have not adjusted our rankings for the referral rate."
Four. Specific data, never invented. If we have not verified a yacht's LOA, beam, draft, GT, year built, builder, capacity, or crew count, we do not publish the yacht. If a single non-critical data point is unverified, it is tagged inline as [VERIFY: pending]. We do not paraphrase a spec sheet we have not seen. We do not write "approximately 50m" when the brokerage page says 51.4m. We do not invent refit dates. We do not invent captain names.
Five. Conflict of interest declared in line. When a yacht we cover is represented by a broker we hold a referral agreement with, the page says so on the row. When a builder we cover has paid for sponsored content elsewhere on the site, the editorial page on that builder carries an explicit note. When a contributor has personally worked for a yacht or a broker we cover, that contributor is recused from the page. The recusal is logged internally and disclosed on the affected page where the recusal is material.
Six. Corrections published, dated, in line. Every correction is rewritten in place and dated at the foot of the page. Material corrections also get a 30-day notice at the top. We do not silently edit. We do not unpublish a page to make a problem go away.
The editorial firewall
The publisher (Fredrik Filipsson) does not write or assign editorial copy. The editorial side has a working brief and a deadline and chooses what to cover and where to rank. The commercial side negotiates referral rates, sponsored content rate cards, premium listings, and affiliate placement format. The two sides do not vote on each other's work.
The publisher has a final say on both. The publisher has signed a written commitment, kept on file, that editorial wins any commercial-versus-editorial dispute except where the commercial complaint is a factual error, in which case the page is corrected on the facts and the editorial verdict revisited only if the corrected facts would have changed the verdict.
The number of times the firewall has been tested in 2026: 11 attempts from partners to influence ranking, 2 sponsorship deals declined because the partner expected ranking influence, 0 rankings changed for money.
Ranking policy
Best-of rankings on this site are decided by the 37-point yacht review checklist (for yachts) and the 22-point broker review rubric (for brokers), set out in detail on the methodology page. The ranking decision sits with editorial.
The ranking does not consider the commission rate paid by the broker who lists the yacht. We hold roughly equivalent referral rates with all major broker partners on purpose, so that the commercial line is not a tiebreaker.
The ranking does consider reader experience reports we have verified. A yacht that was rated highly in the 2025 review cycle and produced two verified guest complaints with a shared root cause in 2026 will be moved down or removed.
The ranking does not consider personal relationships. The editor is on first-name terms with several brokers on the rankings. The first-name terms do not move them up. If anything, they raise the bar, because the brokers will tell us the truth about their own books, which is harder to extract from a broker we do not know.
Conflict of interest policy
A contributor who has personally worked for an operator, broker, builder, yacht, or yard in the last 36 months is recused from any page covering that operator. The recusal is logged internally.
A contributor with a current commercial relationship with any operator on the site (whether as a captain, broker, agent, or supplier) is recused from all pages covering that operator and from any comparison page where that operator is named.
The editor's recusal is the same. The editor is recused from any page on which the editor's For Kings network holds a financial interest beyond the standard affiliate or referral fee.
The publisher's For Kings network holds a financial relationship with the four sister sites (VillasForKings, HotelsForKings, RestaurantsForKings, BarsForKings) but not with any yacht operator, broker, builder, or yard.
What we will never publish
We will never publish a yacht we have not put through the 37-point checklist. We will never publish a broker we have not mystery-shopped. We will never publish a destination page that has not been re-verified within the quarter.
We will never publish a ranking we cannot defend in a written verdict line. If you read a "fifth place" and cannot tell why the yacht is fifth and not third, email the editor and we will rewrite the verdict.
We will never publish revenue figures by partner or by quarter. The mechanism and the ranges are public, on the how we make money page. The exact share by partner is commercially sensitive.
We will never publish a reader's name or contact information without explicit written consent.
We will never publish AI-generated yacht spec data, AI-generated charter rate data, or AI-generated broker contact data. Editorial copy is written by editorial. Spec, rate, and contact data is sourced from the broker, the captain, the registry, the classification record, and the operator's official material. AI is used in this operation for grammar passes, fact-check cross-references against published material, and internal log handling. It is not used to generate the editorial verdict or the spec sheet.
What we will publish that other yacht editorial will not
We will publish a "passed on" section in every best-of. Boat International does not. Burgess will not. The reason is structural. Their revenue requires it.
We will publish broker performance comparisons (Burgess versus Edmiston, IYC versus Northrop and Johnson) on the merits, with named failure modes and named strengths. Broker-owned guides cannot rank their own listings honestly. They do not run these pieces.
We will publish refit-quality verdicts on the major shipyards (Lurssen Bremen versus Lurssen Rendsburg refit shop, Feadship Aalsmeer versus Feadship Makkum, the Pendennis refit shop in Falmouth, the Lusben refit yard at Viareggio, the Compositeworks yard at La Ciotat) on the basis of completed-refit quality, schedule slip, and warranty conduct. Shipyards do not love these pieces. We run them anyway.
What you can hold us to
This page is the standard. The methodology page is the process. The how we make money page is the revenue. The three pages together are the contract with the reader.
If a published page on this site violates a commitment in this document, the route to enforcement is editor@yachtsforkings.com, with the URL in the subject line. We will respond within five working days. If the violation is verified, we correct or unpublish, depending on the size of the violation, and we log it on the contact page corrections table. If the violation is not verified, we will say so in the reply with the reasoning. We do not stonewall.