Must See Boats: Biggest and Smallest at a Boat Show
The biggest boats and the smallest boats often end up on your must-see short list.
February 3, 2015
Boat shows, by definition, jam as many yachts as possible side-by-side, a super-sized approach similar to how jewelers cram display cases so full of diamonds that buyers don’t know where to look next. At the 2014 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, more than $4 billion worth of boats were lined up for inspection. This February, some 500 yachts at the Miami Yacht & Brokerage Show are expected to be worth more than $1 billion.
The Miami Yacht & Brokerage Show is so big, it can be hard for any single yacht to stand out.
Who can look at 500 or even 100 boats during a long weekend at a boat show? Maybe Speedy Gonzales, but not your typical human. It’s not physically possible. If you figure on a 15-minute tour of each boat or yacht plus time to walk from one to the next, you’re going to see about three an hour, or about 25 per day if you hustle with no lunch break or dawdling.
That means every serious buyer in attendance has to make choices—and usually, those choices are made before the boat show even starts. Typically, the newest boats receive the most press and draw the most attention, making it to the top of buyers’ “must-see" lists. But there’s another trick sellers use to get their boat atop your schedule: Have the biggest or smallest boat in the show.
Having the biggest boat—whether it's the biggest of the whole show or just in a defined group—works wonders not only with attendees, but also with the media, which can give a boat a huge “buzz advantage” before a show opens. Motoryacht Trident to Rule the Show at Fort Lauderdale. The Largest Riva Yacht Makes Its World Debut. Those are real-world headlines that gave free press to yachts that otherwise would have been just one among hundreds. Instead, they became names and brands that buyers knew to seek out.
Another recent headline shows this concept being flipped: The Biggest and Smallest Motorboats at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show. It ran in Florida’s Sun-Sentinel newspaper, giving readers a reason to check out not only the 196-foot Benetti Swan, but also the yacht tenders that would barely register as a water toy aboard the superyacht. That’s right: Just as the biggest yacht in a show can become a story, so can the smallest.
The trick even works on industry insiders, including brokers who attended the recent Antigua Charter Yacht Show. For largest yacht, there was a tie at 295 feet between the Corsair Nero and the Royal Huisman Athena. They were far from the newest on display (Nero launched in 2007, Athena in 2004), but their status as the biggest got people aboard. The same was true for the 52-foot sailing catamaran Lotus, the show’s smallest entry. Situated on the same dock as Nero, she might have looked downright puny and ripe for passing up; instead she had some caché because of her status as the littlest sister in the marina.
Is this marketing trick used for other boats? Sure—biggest catamaran in a show, smallest center console in a show, widest-beam motoryacht in a show—whatever a boat seller can think of, with creativity as the only limit. Just because a yacht isn’t the newest or nicest doesn’t mean it won’t get all the publicity, and it might just end up on your list of must-see boats at the boat show.
