The following opinion column by Giuseppe Cicatelli was published on Marine Business News on November 9, 2026. The full column can be found here
Writing for Marine Business News, the Australian marine trade title, Giuseppe Cicatelli starts from Blackstone’s agreement to buy Hamilton Island. Most of the coverage focused on the resort and the golf course; from Puerto Rico, the detail that stood out was the marina. Eight months earlier Blackstone had paid US$5.65 billion for Safe Harbor, the largest marina network in the United States, which has since agreed to take on the MarineMax marinas for another US$1.5 billion. Safe Harbor’s largest Caribbean marina sits in Fajardo, a few miles from Grand Caribbean Marinas.
The column traces how American marinas changed category. Safe Harbor was formed in 2015 by American Infrastructure Funds, bought in 2020 for US$2.1 billion by Sun Communities, a real estate trust, and sold in 2025 to Blackstone’s infrastructure arm: leisure, then real estate, then infrastructure, in ten years. Once a marina is treated as infrastructure, the buyer pays for the berth, the land and the recurring storage income, and the restaurant, the yard and the charter desk become tenants. After Hurricane María, Grand Caribbean Marinas rebuilt commercial space and let specialist operators run it. Today it separates annual storage customers from short stays and records why each boat leaves.
Looking across the Pacific, Cicatelli notes that d’Albora, Australia’s largest marina network, has made a similar journey, and that Queensland and the Southeast United States share year-round boating and a storm season. If the category has moved, he writes, the questions an owner is asked move with it: who renews, which income is really ours, and what would run without us.
“What changed is not the marinas but their category, and you can read the shift in the ownership of the largest group.”
Giuseppe Cicatelli, Marine Business News, 9 November 2026
Read the full column at Marine Business News. A bilingual note on the article is also available on giuseppecicatelli.com.
About Giuseppe Cicatelli
Giuseppe Cicatelli is the Founder and Principal of Bacalia Group and Executive Chairman of Grand Caribbean Marinas. Read his biography at Bacalia Group, visit giuseppecicatelli.com, or see more news and interviews with Giuseppe Cicatelli.