The following opinion column by Giuseppe Cicatelli was published on SuperyachtNews on November 4, 2026. The full column can be found here
In an opinion column published by SuperyachtNews, the business title of The Superyacht Group, Giuseppe Cicatelli responds to marina consultant Oscar Siches’ recent piece on “the culture of inflating value” with an operator’s view from Fajardo. He agrees that marina valuations should be grounded in time spent on the docks, but argues that the American market rests on different foundations from Europe: most US marinas sit on fee simple land the owner holds outright, with submerged-land leases from the state that are routinely renewed for operators who keep up their side of the bargain, while European marinas are concessions that expire and go back out to tender. All six Grand Caribbean Marinas facilities are held fee simple, some with concession rights as well.
The column places Puerto Rico inside the US roll-up: Safe Harbor’s 138 marinas and its US$5.65 billion sale to Blackstone Infrastructure, Suntex passing 100 marinas, and Safe Harbor’s US$1.5 billion agreement to buy MarineMax and IGY. Safe Harbor owns Puerto del Rey in Fajardo, the largest marina in the Caribbean and Grand Caribbean Marinas’ neighbour and competitor. From the operator’s side, Cicatelli lists the four things buyers actually price, in order: regional scale, location, customer tenure and revenue mix. Annual slip holders at Grand Caribbean Marinas’ Fajardo facilities stay 8.6 years on average, close to the 8.3-year tenure Safe Harbor reported when Sun Communities acquired it in 2020.
His central point is that only storage income, whether wet slips, dry stack or boats on the hard, behaves like infrastructure and deserves an infrastructure multiple. Repair yards, restaurants, boat dealerships and charter fleets are services, hospitality and retail businesses that happen to sit on the waterfront. After Hurricane María, Grand Caribbean Marinas rebuilt its six marinas, about US$50 million of investment, and built commercial space, restaurants and facilities for charter companies and boat clubs, but leased all of it to specialist operators so that storage stayed at the heart of the business.
“Infrastructure investors pay for long-lived assets with predictable, recurring cash flow, and in a marina only one revenue line really qualifies: storage, whether wet slips, dry stack or boats on the hard.”
Giuseppe Cicatelli, SuperyachtNews, 4 November 2026
Read the full column at SuperyachtNews. 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.