MIAMI INTERNATIONAL BOAT SHOW
Mid February · Miami · Five Days · Since 1941
The Miami International Boat Show runs over the Presidents’ Day weekend across six sites in the city, and it is the oldest boat show in the world still running.
Everything from a kayak to a yacht of nearly three hundred feet. The American market for the year is set here.
The Oldest
It began in 1941 as the Biscayne Boat Show: one tent and fifty boats, put on by the Miami junior chamber of commerce.
It has run every year since, through a world war and several recessions, and through the one piece of legislation that nearly destroyed American boatbuilding. In 1990 Congress placed a ten per cent surcharge on boats sold above a hundred thousand dollars. Buyers stopped buying, or bought abroad. The yards laid off thousands of people who were not rich. The tax was repealed in 1993, having raised almost nothing.
The show’s attendance record was set in 1967 and has never been beaten: a hundred and seventy-one thousand people. It is a larger show now by every measure except that one.
In 2016, at seventy-five, it moved back to the water where it started.
The Sea Trials
This is what separates Miami from the Mediterranean shows.
Monaco and Cannes are displays. The boats are moored, admired and photographed, and anyone who wants to know how one handles must arrange that separately and afterward.
Miami puts a hundred and fifty vessels in the water for sea trials. You take the wheel. There is a freshwater pool of forty thousand gallons on land for demonstrations, and a marina given over to nothing but test drives.
Which is why the show sells rather than exhibits, and why the American yards bring their new hulls here rather than to the Riviera in September.
What to Know
Six venues across the city, and one ticket covers all of them. Shuttles and boats run between. Allow a full day to see two of them properly.
The convention centre holds boats up to about fifty feet. Herald Plaza holds thirty feet to a hundred and twenty-five. The superyachts are out on Watson Island, which is a separate journey.
There is no box office at the show. Tickets are digital and bought in advance.
A preview day runs on the Wednesday, ahead of the crowds, at roughly double the price. It is worth it if you intend to talk to anybody.
The mistake is trying to see all of it. Six sites in five days is a week’s work. Choose the two that hold what you came for.
The Court
The Miami International Boat Show is not the Court’s own. Preview access, sea trials aboard particular vessels, introductions to the yards and brokers, and rooms in the city are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward. The Palm Beach season is an hour north and the two can be taken together.
