Getting your yacht charter or boat tour found on Google Maps in Phuket

Guests who are already in Phuket look for a boat on Google Maps before they look at your website. Three things decide whether they find you and write to you: a pin where they actually board, a primary category that matches what they type, and photos and prices for each boat in your fleet. All three are free to change in your Google Business Profile, and you can finish them this week.

Where the pin goes: the marina, not the office

Your office may be in Chalong, Rawai or Phuket Town. Your boats are somewhere else. A profile carries one pin, and that pin belongs where the guest meets you and the crew.

If guests board at Ao Po Grand Marina, the pin goes to the marina entrance, not to the address on your company papers. A guest who follows the pin to a closed office in Phuket Town at 07:30 does not become a booking, and you will never hear about it.

1. Search your business name in Google Maps while signed in as the owner, then open "Edit profile".
2. In "Location", set the address of the marina you depart from.
3. Drag the map pin to the gate or the car park where guests arrive, not into the water.
4. In the description, give the pontoon in one short line, for example "Boarding at Ao Po Grand Marina, pontoon C, 08:00".
5. Copy that same line into your booking confirmation, so the pin and the message agree.

If staff meet guests at two different marinas (an east coast departure for Phang Nga Bay, a Chalong departure for Phi Phi), each place can have its own profile, with its own hours, photos and phone number. Do not create a second profile for the same pontoon with extra keywords in the name: Google's guidelines allow one profile per location, and duplicates get merged or suspended. The rules and the verification steps are on Google Business Profile Help.

The marinas that publish their capacity tell you where the boats sit:

That is 842 wet berths across those four, by their own figures. ONE°15 Marina Panwa Phuket, at the southern tip near the Phi Phi route, has its environmental assessment approved and is announced for 2027, according to ONE°15 Marina. If you move a departure point there, change the address in the week it actually happens, not before.

Categories and name: match what guests type

The primary category is the single field that most affects which searches show your profile. Open the category field and type "boat", "yacht" or "tour": you will see several options. Pick the one that matches the words your guests use, not the one that flatters the business.

A practical way to choose: ask your last ten guests what they typed. If they typed "catamaran charter", a rental or charter category fits. If they typed "boat tour Phi Phi", a tour category fits. Set that as primary, then add the others as secondary categories.

Two more fields in the same screen:

• Name: your real name on your boats and your paperwork. Nothing else. "Andaman Blue Charters" stays "Andaman Blue Charters", even when you would rather it read like a search query.
• Services: list each trip as its own item (full-day Phi Phi, sunset cruise, Phang Nga Bay private charter, bareboat week). Each item gets its own short description, so the profile answers questions before anyone writes to you.

If you hold a tour business licence from the Department of Tourism, write the licence number in the description. It costs nothing and it separates you from an unlicensed speedboat. A public consultation on new security deposit amounts ran from 17 August to 30 September 2026, with existing operators getting a one-year grace period once enacted, according to The Nation. For what applies to your own company, ask the Department of Tourism or a Thai lawyer, not a blog.

One photo set per boat, not one sunset

Guests are choosing a boat, not a brand. A profile with twelve sunset photos and no deck photo loses to a profile that shows the actual vessel.

Shoot each boat separately, from the pontoon, with a phone, in the morning light:

1. The boat at its berth, whole, from the dock.
2. The deck and shade area, empty and clean.
3. The cabin, the heads and the galley for anything overnight.
4. The swim platform and the water toys.
5. The crew in uniform, faces visible.
6. One photo of the boarding point, so the guest recognises the gate.

Upload them from the Google Maps app while you are standing there. Name the vessel in the first words of each caption. After a refit, replace the old photos the same week: a 2019 interior photo creates a complaint on boarding day.

Add a short video of the boat under way if you have one. And keep adding photos every month, including low season. A profile that stops moving in May looks closed in June.

Prices, booking links and what they save you

Put a "from" price on every service item, and say what is excluded. National park fees are the classic argument on the pontoon: Maya Bay charges foreign visitors 400 THB and Thai visitors 40 THB, and that bay collected 549.87 million THB in entrance fees from more than 1.6 million visitors between October 2023 and 22 July 2024, according to The Nation via Asia News Network. Write "park fees not included, 400 THB per foreign guest at Maya Bay" and the dispute disappears.

Then make the contact route match the guest. Add your booking page as the booking link, turn on Messages only if someone answers within the hour, and put WhatsApp and LINE numbers in the description. Business use of WhatsApp in Thailand grew 208% in 2024, according to The Nation, and LINE has about 56 million users in Thailand, according to DataReportal.

A direct inquiry is worth the work. Here is the arithmetic, with hypothetical round numbers:

Published ranges for these marketplaces are 20% to 35% for GetYourGuide, Viator and Klook, negotiated per account, according to the vendor guides from Magpie; Viator also charges a 29 USD listing fee per product, per Magpie, and SamBoat takes 20% on the rental plus 10% on extras paid online, per its own terms. GetYourGuide itself publishes no rate: it says the commission depends on your country and is disclosed after sign-up, on its supplier site.

Reviews in the languages your guests read

In the first half of 2026, Russians were the largest group visiting Phuket with 583,041 arrivals, then Indians with 326,906 and Chinese with 322,315, according to CBRE Thailand. A wall of English reviews answers one of those three.

Ask every guest, in the same words, at the same moment: on the way back in, when the day is done and the photos are on their phone. Ask all of them, not only the happy ones, and offer nothing in exchange. Google's policies do not allow buying reviews, filtering who you ask, or giving a discount for one, and getting caught costs you the reviews you already have.

Reply to every review in the language it was written in, within a day or two. A short, factual reply is enough: name the boat, name the trip, answer the complaint. Across markets, 89% of consumers expect businesses to respond to reviews, according to the BrightLocal Consumer Review Survey 2025 as reported by Searchlab.

Two extras that follow from your arrival mix. Russian guests use Yandex Maps: one Phuket restaurant, Chekhoff, carries 3,508 ratings on its Yandex Maps listing, so claiming your own listing there is a free afternoon. Chinese guests rate Xiaohongshu (RED) as their most influential channel at 4.09 out of 5, ahead of Douyin, in a 2025 Prince of Songkla University study. If you handle Mandarin on board, that is where the photos belong. Our own breakdown of the ranking factors is in the Google Maps guide.

What this will not fix

Google Maps will not flatten your season. January and February account for 43% of first-half air arrivals and June only 11%, according to Knight Frank, and the Similan and Surin national parks close every monsoon: 16 May to 14 October in 2025, per the Government Public Relations Department. Put your real low season hours and your park closures in the profile, and keep selling the trips that run.

It will not replace the marketplaces either. In a survey of 2,550 US and European travellers in late 2025, fewer than half had booked their most recent tour or activity online, and only 18% to 24% of experiences were booked on the same day, against as much as 60% in 2023, according to Arival and Phocuswright as reported by Hotel Online. More guests now decide before they land, which is exactly where GetYourGuide, Viator and Klook earn their commission. Keep them for the planners and keep your profile for the guests already in Patong, Kata or Bang Tao with a free day tomorrow.

And it will not fix a late boat, an unanswered WhatsApp message, or a skipper who skips the briefing. Google Maps only decides who gets the chance to ask.

Start this week

Walk to the pontoon with your phone, drag your pin to the gate your guests actually use, and photograph every boat in the fleet from the six angles above. That is one morning, and it is the change that shows up fastest. If you want to see where the charter stands before you touch anything, Notorioos runs a free Visibility Check that shows where the business appears on Google Maps and in AI answers in five languages.