Superyachts are often talked about as floating lifestyle accessories, but the reality is more concrete: they are long-lived economic engines that keep paying communities back year after year. From the Palm Beach show floor, host Kristina Heberts sits down with Robert van Tol, Executive Director of SYBAss, the Super Yacht Builders Association, to unpack what the builders see that most outsiders miss.

They dig into what SYBAss does for custom and semi-custom yacht builders worldwide and why scale matters when you’re discussing standards, supply chains, and representation. Robert shares key takeaways from an economic impact study focused on yachts over 40 meters, covering the full yacht life cycle: new build, operations, and the rising wave of maintenance and refit. The pair talks about how yacht operations drive recurring local spending through crews, services, and yacht tourism, and why refit growth is a predictable result of the industry’s strong production over the last two decades. If you care about the blue economy, maritime jobs, or working waterfronts, the numbers are hard to ignore.

The conversation turns to the workforce challenge: superyacht building depends on specialized, high-skill craftsmanship that many schools don’t teach, making apprenticeships and training programs essential. On the policy side, Robert explains SYBAss’s approach to advocacy at the IMO, where regulations built for commercial shipping can create unintended obstacles for yachts with totally different operating patterns. They close with what makes a boat show truly work for builders and how changing buyers are already pushing yacht design forward years before the public ever sees it.

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