Notes from Cannes Yachting Festival

Sunshine, fresh seaside smell and beautiful vessels. With all of these, there are very few places better than French Riviera in September. It is a great place to store sunlight and get energized before the upcoming long Finnish winter. We visited Cannes Yachting Festival to see the prospects in yacht management and chartering. It is pleasing to see that Marfle Fleet Analytics picks interest of companies from different walks of maritime. There is a growing demand for digitalization in the industry.

The festival is the largest in-water exhibition in the world for new sailboats. This year’s festival was a treat for the eyes with all its splendour. It hosted 51.000 visitors and 542 exhibitors with 638 boats from 2,1 to 55 m long. Vieux Port and Port Canto were main locations. Vieux Port is the old port in city centre and devoted to prominent motorboat brands, shipyards, engine manufactures and service providers to showcase their abilities. On the other hand, Port Canto housed sailing boats, chartering, brokerage and yacht management companies. Dazzling superyacht industry is quite unlike to any other in the world. VIP customers were indulged with utmost respect in motorboats and sailing boats which served as stands for the exhibitors.

Cannes is one of the favourite places of jet set. Every year, red carpet is rolled out for the stars and celebrities who swarm to the city for Cannes Film Festival. Sky is the limit for a luxurious lifestyle. I only wished to take the boat for transportation between ports along with other VIP participants, but my fate was sharing the shuttle along with other poor visitors. It was nice to see the multihulls that set sail from Port Canto for La Regata sailboat competition. Competing with these teams is not everyone’s cup of tea.

It is again surprising to see that latest developments in IoT hasn’t changed this segments much. Even though the engine is the main asset for yacht owners and management companies, they still heavily rely on skipper’s gut feelings instead of real-time data. Marfle Fleet Analytics can be beneficial for this segment in many ways. Minimizing engine failures and downtimes, extending engine health and improving fuel economy can make both yacht owner and yacht management company happier.

Engine failures can be prevented through in-depth engine data analyses including fuel rates, boost pressures, exhaust temperatures, etc. Maintenance activities can be planned accordingly with real-time and historical engine faults.

When it comes to bareboat chartering, driving style features can extend engine life by analysing cold starts, insufficient cool downs and fast accelerations. Chartering companies have no real-time information about how the vessel is being operated and the condition of the engine. On the other hand, Marfle Fleet Analytics can even be more useful for the companies that operate their own vessels.

After a series of back to back meetings, we had very good contacts and our first installations for a motorboat or sailing boat can take place soon. We at Marfle cut our teeth in different segments of marine industry like pilotage, towage, border guards and CTVs in offshore energy industry, but there is still a lot of room for growing in other segments. We believe that all the companies that manage fleets will employ remote monitoring and engine analytics technologies in the upcoming years and this will make their job way easier than today.