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MYS 2026: Jonacor Yachts on Buying the Yacht You’ll Actually Use
Ask most brokers what a client wants and you'll get a spec sheet in reply — length, range, cabins, toys. Ask Jonacor Yachts, and the answer starts somewhere else entirely: what do you actually want to do with it? That question sits at the centre of how Jonacor approaches yacht ownership, and it's proven more revealing than any list of requirements. It's also, the shipyard suggests, where a lot of buying decisions in this market quietly go wrong — owners chasing scale or spec before they've properly answered what the yacht is actually for. At the Monaco Yacht Show, Shari Liu sits down with Jonacor Yachts' Olga Rehbein to revisit a conversation from last year about how yacht buyers are changing — and to find out what's shifted in the twelve months since.
The answer, according to Jonacor, isn't really about size or specification anymore.
"I see a tendency that... now it's getting more about consciousness and the mindset."
That shift shows up most clearly in the questions clients bring to the table. Where buyers once arrived asking what a yacht could offer, Jonacor says the conversation has moved somewhere more personal.
"People don't ask so many questions anymore... but my clients ask me 'how can the yacht fit into my life?' They think less about the biggest and most expensive, but what really fits them."
That reframing starts with a single question Jonacor believes should come before anything else: what does the owner actually want to do with the yacht. It sounds simple, but the answer tends to do most of the work in narrowing down what's right for a given buyer.
"Very often my clients come to me and they know what they want... what the buyer wants to do with a yacht becomes a very, very important question."
It's an idea closely tied to another principle Jonacor returns to often — finding what's "necessary and sufficient." But that phrase, easily mistaken for a call to scale ambitions down, means something more specific in practice.
"Buyers want mainly the same thing. They want maximum volume, the most beautiful interior... for me 'necessary and sufficient' is not about becoming modest, it's about becoming precise."
Taken together, the shift Jonacor describes isn't a retreat from ambition — it's a sharper, more deliberate version of it, built around owners who increasingly know not just what they want a yacht to look like, but what they want a yacht to actually be for.
"Now we are selling something different. We sell time, confidence... He also buys our experience, our professionalism."
"Now we are selling something different. We sell time, confidence... He also buys our experience, our professionalism."
Olga Rehbein