Introduction

Charter Boats is a marketplace for charter boat rentals with unified calendar sync across multiple booking platforms (MMK Booking Manager, Nausys, and any iCal calendar including Google and Apple Calendar). We expose two developer surfaces, split by who's calling:

Discovery API — for guests & agents

Public, no auth. Search boats, locations, POIs, routes, trips, and content. Powers our MCP server, Custom GPT, and in-browser agents.

Operator API — for owners & partners

REST. Read platform data and import/delete listings. Send your API key on every call.

Which one do I want?

You are...	Use	Auth
An AI assistant, agent, or app looking things up for a user	Discovery API (or the MCP server)	None
A boat owner or channel manager managing your own listings	Operator API	API key on every call
A developer building search/discovery into your own product	Either — discovery for conversational/compact results, operator reads for raw data	None for Discovery; API key for operator reads

The two surfaces overlap on read ("search boats" exists in both), but they serve different jobs. The Discovery API returns compact, fuzzy-matched results tuned for LLMs. The Operator API returns raw records and is where the write actions live (import a boat, delete a boat). Every Operator API call — reads included — carries your key in the X-API-Key header; only the iCal feeds are open, because calendar apps can't send headers.

Booking and payment are not a public API. Reserving and paying for a charter runs through the charter.boats checkout, which requires a logged-in guest session and completes payment with Stripe Elements in the browser. There is no API-key path to create a booking.

Base URLs

https://charter.boats/api          # Operator API (key on every call)
https://charter.boats/api/ai        # Discovery API (public)
https://charter.boats/mcp           # MCP server (public)

Getting started

Owners & partners:

Get your API key — Dashboard → Settings → API generates an API key once you accept the API terms.
Import your first boat — see the Quick Start.
Set up calendar sync — export your iCal feed to sync with other platforms.

AI builders:

Connect the MCP server at https://charter.boats/mcp, or
Call the Discovery API directly — no key, just rate limits.

Need help?

API & integrations: contact us
Technical help: contact us