Cannes Yachting Festival Daywork: Beds, Budget, Day Rates
The Cannes Yachting Festival is the first big show of the European autumn, and daywork at Cannes is one of the few weeks a year when boats are short-handed enough to take a chance on green crew. The 2026 edition runs 8–13 September, split across the Vieux Port and Port Canto, with roughly 700 boats and 680 exhibitors. It lands in the same slot most years — the second week of September — with the Monaco Yacht Show a couple of weeks behind it.
If you're reading this in the days before the show, the useful news is that the work has already started. Build-up crews are on the docks now.
The Vieux Port — the main festival site, and a ten-minute walk from Cannes station. Photo: Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0.
What the daywork actually is
Cannes daywork splits into three phases, and they're not the same job.
Build-up (roughly the week before). This is the bulk of the green-crew hiring and the least glamorous part. You're washing down, polishing stainless, humping fenders and lines, wiping salt off glass for the fourth time that day, setting up passerelle carpet and stanchions. Long hours in September heat. It's also the easiest work to walk into cold, because everyone is behind schedule.
Show days (8–13 September). Fewer bodies needed, but the ones taken on are visible: keeping the boat immaculate between viewings, meeting and greeting, handing out water, shoe covers on and off, glass polishing below deck. Interior daywork gets competitive because brokers want crew who look and sound the part; deck is more about the wash-down before the gates open. If you land show days, you spend a week standing next to captains and management companies — that's the actual prize.
Breakdown (the two or three days after). Everything comes off the boat, and yachts leave for winter or head east toward Monaco. Grubby, fast, well paid, and the easiest gig to get if you already worked build-up for the same team.
The money at Cannes is fine. The reason to be there is that you spend ten days standing on other people's boats, being seen working hard by people who hire.
Port Canto, the festival's second site, 2 km east along the Croisette. Check which one your boat is on before you set off. Photo: public domain.
Where you'll sleep: Antibes, not Cannes
Here's the honest part: Cannes has almost no crew accommodation. It's a resort town, hotel prices during the festival are absurd, and the crew infrastructure — houses, agencies, laundry, chandlery, the noticeboards — all sits 12 km up the coast in Antibes. Nearly everyone working Cannes commutes in, with some spillover into Golfe-Juan, Juan-les-Pins and Nice.
A "crew house" is not a hotel. Expect a bunk in a shared room of four to six, a shared kitchen and bathroom, laundry, decent Wi-Fi, a printer for CVs, and a noticeboard or WhatsApp group where daywork gets passed around. That last part is the reason to take one over a cheap Airbnb — most green crew get their first Cannes day from someone in their kitchen, not from an agency.
The long-running Antibes houses crew actually name include The Crew Grapevine, The Crew House, The Glamorgan, Debbie's Crew House and Bohobo's, plus smaller independents like Amma's. Most cluster around Port Vauban and the old town — walking distance to the agencies on and around rue Aubernon and the Galerie du Port.
| Antibes bed | Typical rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Shared dorm bunk | €25–€45/night, ~€150–€260/week | Cheapest beds fill first |
| Private/en-suite room | €40–€60/night, ~€260–€330/week | Worth it if you're staying months, not weeks |
| Budget/further out | from ~€20/night, ~€120/week | Longer walk or a bus to the port |
Most houses work week-by-week rather than on a lease, ask for a deposit and a minimum stay, and several want to see your CV before they'll confirm a bed — they're keeping the house crew-only. Book before you fly during show season. Beds in Antibes go tight from late August through the Monaco show, and turning up bedless on the 6th of September is a genuinely bad plan. If the houses are full, the Antibes crew Facebook groups are where the overflow lives; treat any request for a bank transfer before you've seen the place with suspicion.
What a fortnight costs
Rough euros for two weeks based around Cannes and Monaco, sharing a dorm. Prices climb during show season — assume the top of each range if you're booking late.
| Item | Two weeks |
|---|---|
| Crew house bunk | €300–€520 |
| Food (self-catering, coffee, the odd beer) | €150–€250 |
| Trains/buses Antibes↔Cannes | €80–€120 |
| eSIM / data | €15–€25 |
| Kit: 3 white polos, black shorts, non-marking deck shoes | €120–€200 |
| Flights in (from Europe) | €80–€250 |
| Two-week total | €750–€1,350 |
Add certificates if you don't have them yet: STCW Basic Training plus an ENG1 medical will run you well over €1,000 before you've bought a flight, and no one will legally put you on a boat without both.
Realistic runway: arrive with €1,500–€2,000 and be prepared to stay a month. People who show up with a week's money make bad decisions — they take the first thing offered, or they leave three days before the job would have come.
Day rates: what you'll actually earn
Green daywork in the Med sits around €120–€150 a day, generally cash, usually 8–10 hours, sometimes with lunch on board. Show weeks push the top of that: €150–€180 is common for build-up and breakdown when boats are desperate, and crew with a relevant ticket can ask for more. Some agencies invoice instead of paying cash — slower, but it's a paper trail, and it's worth asking which you're getting before you start.
What nobody tells you: you will not work every day. A green crew member with no contacts might get four to eight days out of a two-week stretch around Cannes. Do the arithmetic honestly:
- 8 days × €150 = €1,200
- Minus two weeks of living costs (~€800) = around €400 clear
That's a decent outcome, not a windfall, and it's about par for a show week. You're roughly funding yourself while building the two things that actually get you hired — a handful of dock references and the ability to say you've worked a show.
Cash rules: ask the rate before you start, agree the hours, and get the name of the boat. Don't chase €20 an hour and skip a return offer from a boat that liked you.
Antibes to Cannes by train (and from Monaco)
The whole coast runs on one TER line (the Marseille–Ventimiglia corridor, branded Zou! in the region), and it's the reason commuting to Cannes works at all.
Antibes → Cannes: about 10–15 minutes, roughly €4–5 each way, often several trains an hour at peak. It's the single best argument for basing in Antibes.
Monaco (Monte-Carlo) → Cannes: about 1 hour to 1 hour 15, roughly €12–13, some direct, some with a change at Nice-Ville. Doable daily, but it's a long tail on top of a 12-hour build-up shift.
Buy on the Zou! app or SNCF Connect; station machines work too, but queues before 08:00 during show week are real. Three things that bite people:
- Check the last train before you accept a late shift. Service thins out late evening, and build-up shifts run over constantly. Being stranded in Cannes at 01:00 costs more in taxi than you earned that day.
- French rail strikes happen. Have a bus backup in mind (Zou! coaches and Lignes d'Azur run the coast road) and check the app the night before.
- Know which port you're in. From Cannes station it's about 700 m, ten minutes, down through the Pantiero to the Vieux Port; Port Canto is a further 2 km east along the Croisette, with sea shuttles running between the two sites roughly every 15 minutes. Ask your boat which side it's on before you set off — and don't turn up at a public entrance carrying a kit bag, they're turned away.
A TER at Gare d'Antibes. Cannes is 10–15 minutes down the line. Photo: Florian Pépellin, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Cannes, then Monaco
Treat Cannes and Monaco as one campaign, not two trips. Monaco follows a couple of weeks later, most of the same management companies and crew are involved, and a Cannes reference is the cheapest way to get a Monaco day. Book your Antibes bed to cover both, not just the first week.
The straightforward version of Cannes Yachting Festival daywork: get to Antibes with certificates in hand and a month's money, take a bed in a crew house, walk the docks through build-up, say yes to everything, and be the one still polishing when everyone else has drifted off. That's how green crew turn a show week into a season.
Rather than refreshing five Facebook groups at 06:00, you can post your availability once on Radius and let captains and HoDs come to you — free for day workers.