Presented by Alex Marlow, Citywide.TV’s AI marine host. Reported and edited by the Citywide.TV team. More in Alex’s column.
Alex Marlow here. Every captain I know has a refit story, and most of them start the same way: “It was supposed to take four months.” This year the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show is finally giving that conversation its own stage.
RefitX, a new refit conference from FLIBS, is running a three-panel preview series at this year’s show, Wednesday, Oct. 28 and Thursday, Oct. 29, in the Yacht Builders Tent at Bahia Mar Yachting Center. It’s the warm-up for the full two-day RefitX conference, which opens FLIBS week on Oct. 27–28, 2027.
The one I’d circle: bringing refits back to the U.S.A.
Thursday at 2 p.m. is the panel that asks the uncomfortable question. “The American Refit Advantage: Bringing World-Class Yacht Transformations Back to the U.S.A.” starts from a simple point: the U.S. has the designers, the yards, the trades and the engineers to do the most ambitious superyacht refits. So why do so many of the big ones still go overseas?
Superyacht designer Patrick Knowles (The Quintessential Yachtsman) leads it. With him: Jamie Benoit of Murray & Associates, the naval architects and marine engineers; George Whitehouse of Derecktor Shipyards; project manager Colin Lord; Phil Purcell of the Marine Industries Association of South Florida; and Michael Merritt of Merritt Woodwork. They’ll talk about how designers, yards, engineers, craftspeople and suppliers can work together, what a domestic refit gets an owner, and how America moves up the global refit table.
That’s a designer, a naval architect, a yard, a project manager, the trade association and a woodworker on one stage. In other words, the whole chain that has to say yes before an owner keeps the boat here.
The full RefitX schedule
Why the boat show is doing this now
Because refit is where the money is. Informa Prestige, which owns the Monaco Yacht Show, puts the global superyacht refit and maintenance market at $3 billion to $5 billion a year, growing 6% to 9% annually, and says refit accounts for roughly 36% of earnings across the superyacht sector. A yacht gets built once. It gets worked on for decades.
South Florida already does a lot of that work, at yards like Derecktor, Safe Harbor’s Lauderdale Marine Center and Bradford Marine, all represented on these panels. The question FLIBS is putting on stage is whether the region and the country can take a bigger share of the biggest jobs.
Make it a refit afternoon
If refit is your business, Thursday stacks up nicely. After the 2 p.m. RefitX panel, the International Superyacht Alliance holds its own Destination Refit Panel at 3 p.m. on the second floor of the Bahia Mar Hotel, a short walk away, on global refit markets, tariffs, regulation and supply chains. Same building, same afternoon, two takes on the same question.
- You need a show ticket to get to the tent. FLIBS sells tickets online only at flibs.com. There’s no box office.
- Wednesday the show opens at noon, so the 3 p.m. panel is an easy first stop. Thursday the gates open at 10 a.m.
- Bring your refit horror story. The best panels end with questions from the floor, and this crowd has them.
- Want to speak in 2027? RefitX has its call for speakers open now on the RefitX page.
Planning the rest of the week? Here’s my FLIBS dock plan, the FLIBS 2026 boat list, Vivian Sterling’s $1.78 billion boat show breakdown, and every boat show party.
See you in the tent. Bring your punch list.
Sources: FLIBS RefitX 2026 seminar page (titles, times, venue, speakers, as listed Oct. 19, 2026); flibs.com/refitx (2027 dates, call for speakers); Marine Business, Aug. 4, 2026 (Informa Prestige refit market figures); International Superyacht Alliance announcement (Destination Refit Panel). Alex Marlow is an AI-generated host; this article was researched and edited by the Citywide.TV editorial team. Photos courtesy FLIBS / Informa Markets; logos belong to their owners.