In an effort to show that he is cutting his carbon footprint, the Prince of Wales has chartered one of Britain’s biggest and most luxurious private yachts to undertake an 11-day tour of the Caribbean next month.

Accompanied by the Duchess of Cornwall, the Prince will visit Jamaica, Trinidad, St Lucia and Montserrat on board the Leander, a 245ft (75m) motor yacht with 25 crew owned by Sir Donald Gosling, the multimillionaire who founded National Car Parks with a business partner on a bomb site in 1948 and collected £290 million when the company was sold in 1998.

The interior is more chintzy than garish, with pretty patterned sofa and curtains, glass-fronted cabinets full of ornaments, and luxurious rugs that engulf the passengers’ feet.

Sales literature encouraging the super-rich to charter the vessel promises that cabins will be serviced every time that guests leave them, and Leander’s own tenders, standing by to take guests to the nearest beach, are equipped with everything from cold champagne to cold showers.

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“Guests can be as demanding as they like,” the brochure promises.

Leander is usually one of the most expensive British-registered yachts to charter, at about £280,000 a week, depending on itinerary, but Royal sources indicated that Sir Donald, whom the Prince knows well, had always offered it for official business, and had agreed a generous cut-price deal with the Government.

Clarence House said yesterday that chartering Leander would be significantly cheaper than chartering an aircraft to fly the royal party around four islands, and would produce far lower carbon emissions.

The Prince and the Duchess will use normal scheduled flights to and from the Caribbean after being frightened off their plans to charter a private aircraft to attend an environmental awards ceremony in US last year.

Transport to far-flung dominions and remote foreign countries has been an occasional problem since the Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned a decade ago and turned into a floating museum in an Edinburgh dock. At 412ft she was getting on for twice the length of Leander, and her crew of more than 260 Royal Navy officers and ratings, known as “snotty yachties”, provided a far bigger complement than any other private yacht.

Leander is gradually losing out in the size stakes, and even Britannia is being dwarfed by vessels belonging to men of other nations who are much richer than the Queen.

With two helicopter landing pads, a swimming pool, private cinema and submarine, Roman Abramovich’s new plaything, the Eclipse, will be 550ft of unimaginable floating luxury, outdoing the 525ft floating pleasure palace owned by Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai.

The Prince Abdul Aziz, private yacht of the Saudi royal family, is already looking like a mere minnow at 482ft.

But Leander, inside a dark-blue hull that is almost the exact shade of the old royal yacht, offers facilities that Britannia never did, including a swimming pool, two onboard exercise bikes and a team of stewardesses willing to run candlelit baths 24 hours a day.

The Prince and the Duchess – or rather the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which tells them where to go – have recently become much engaged with the Commonwealth, an organisation neglected by British prime ministers more engaged with Europe. The couple visited the Commonwealth summit in Uganda in November and will continue the association on their forthcoming tour.

Climate change will be high on the agenda, with Caribbean islands especially vulnerable and in the forefront of hurricanes. Sustainable development in islands heavily dependent on tourism will be another of the Prince’s themes, as will youth opportunities on islands where drugs, and the export of them to Britain, are a major problem.

While he is in Jamaica the Prince will revisit Rosetown, a slum area of the capital, Kingston, which he last visited in 2000 and where one of his charities, the Foundation for the Built Environment, is backing a redevelopment scheme.

It will be less exciting than his last visit, when he visited Bob Marley’s birthplace and was photographed wearing a rasta wig back to front, to the everlasting distress of his aides.

A world of floating palaces

— Flights from Trinidad to St Lucia, St Lucia to Antigua and Antigua to Jamaica would cover 1,500 miles and produce 800kg of carbon dioxide. Going by boat would produce 278kg of CO2

— Until the launch of the Annaliesse in 2003, Sir Donald Gosling’s Leander was the most expensive charter yacht in the world. The 280ft Annaliesse is now available at up to £575,000 a week

—Oracle’s Larry Ellison owns Rising Sun, a German-made Lürssen that was launched in 2005. It stretches almost 453ft. Roman Abramovich is soon to own the biggest private yacht. At 550ft, the £200million Eclipse is 100ft longer than any frigate or destroyer in the Royal Navy

—The late Gianni Agnelli of Fiat and the gossip columnist Taki travelled on the Leander

—The word “yacht” dates back to 1557, probably from the Norwegian “jaght”, or Dutch “jacht”, a shortened form of “jachtship”. The word means a ship for chasing

All aboard

— Two master suite cabins with office/study and forward-facing saloon

— Three double guest cabins with en-suite bathrooms

— Five twin guest cabins with bathrooms

—Jacuzzi, observation, and helicopter decks, fitness room, dive room and swim platform

— Twenty-four crew, including two chefs

— Length: 246ft. Beam: 43ft. Max speed: 18.5 knots. Range at 14.5 knots: 8,000nm

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