The Cannes Yachting Festival is the first major yacht show of the European autumn calendar, held each September across two harbours in Cannes: the Vieux Port, which carries motor yachts and the majority of world premieres, and Port Canto, which carries sailing yachts and the brokerage and charter fleet.
It is the show at which most European builders choose to put a new model in the water for the first time, which makes it the clearest single read on where the market is heading in the season ahead. For a charter and sales house the value is less in the premieres than in the concentration: owners, captains, managers, and central agents are in one place for six days, and a berth appointment that would otherwise take a month to arrange takes an afternoon.
Drivas Yachts attends Cannes as part of the same annual circuit that takes in Monaco and Fort Lauderdale. We go to see yachts in person rather than on a specification sheet, to meet the captains and managers who run them, and to hold the conversations that place a client aboard the right yacht the following season. What we see at Cannes in September informs what we recommend for the Mediterranean summer that follows.