Princess Sells Seven X90s Before the First Left the Yard

Why did Princess Yachts build the X90?

Princess built the X90 to close a long-standing gap in its X-Class range: the X80 tops out at 24.3 metres and the X95 Vista, the line's flagship, runs to nearly 29 metres, leaving nothing between them for an owner who wanted the range's Super Flybridge layout on a hull that size did not yet cover.

The X-Class launched around the X95 Vista as Princess's answer to the open-plan, beach-club style of flybridge cruiser that had been pulling buyers toward Italian and Dutch yards. The X80 followed as the entry point to the range. Between them sat an obvious hole: an owner who found the X95 too much boat, in cost and crew, but wanted more volume than the X80 offered, had nowhere to go inside the brand. The X90, at 27.1 metres and 145 gross tons, sits almost exactly in the middle of that gap.

CEO Will Green called the Cannes debut 'a defining moment for both the X Class range and Princess Yachts,' language that reads less like launch-day boilerplate and more like an admission of how long the gap had been left open. Princess has been under KPS Capital Partners' ownership since March 2023, after an operating loss of GBP 45.6 million in 2023 forced a turnaround programme; the X90 is one of the first genuinely new models to reach market since that reset, rather than a variant of an existing hull. Staying at 145 GT also keeps the X90 comfortably under the 200 and 300 gross tonnage thresholds that trigger heavier crew certification and compliance rules in several flag states, a detail that matters more to the owner doing the sums than the marketing copy around the flybridge.

What is different about the X90's hull?

The X90 introduces Princess's Hybrid Progressive-Planing hull, developed with the British naval architecture firm Olesinski, which Princess says needs roughly 10 percent less power above 16 knots than the same builder's Y85 despite the X90 carrying around 18 tonnes more weight.

Olesinski, the naval architect behind the hull, built it to hold planing efficiency at higher speeds while still cruising cleanly at low speed, the two ends of the performance envelope that usually pull hull design in opposite directions. Princess's own figures say the X90 matches the lighter Y85's fuel burn below 10 knots, then pulls ahead on power draw once the boat is up on the plane above 16 knots. That is the claim Cannes is meant to put in front of brokers and owners for the first time in person rather than in a press release.

None of those figures are independently verified. The only sea trials run so far were Princess's own, in June 2026, on the single hull built to date, and the two public accounts of that trial do not agree on the resulting top speed: one puts it at 26 knots, another at 28 knots 'depending on engine specification.' An owner comparing the X90 against a competitor's number should treat both figures as provisional until a second hull, or an independent trial, confirms one.

How many Princess X90s have sold?

Princess had sold seven X90s and had four more under construction by May 2026, months before the debut hull finished sea trials or reached Cannes, an order pace that functions as real-world validation of the size gap Princess had identified.

Pre-launch sales are not unusual for an established range extension, but selling seven hulls against a single unbuilt prototype is a stronger signal than most yards get before a boat has a public specification sheet, let alone a Cannes berth. It suggests existing X-Class owners and brokers had been asking for exactly this size before Princess confirmed it, rather than the yard discovering demand after the fact.

For a prospective buyer, the practical consequence is a queue: four hulls already committed to construction ahead of any order placed after the Cannes reveal, on a range where Princess has not published a price. The order sits inside a wider recovery: Princess's EBITDA grew roughly 84 percent between 2022 and 2023 as the turnaround took hold, the company says it returned to profitability in 2025 with EBITDA up more than 100 percent year on year, and its order book across the whole range now exceeds GBP 700 million with around 90 percent of 2025 production capacity already sold. That combination, real demand and no public number, means early pricing information will come from brokers and resale listings after the first deliveries, not from the yard's own literature - worth confirming directly with a dealer before assuming list price tracks the X80 or X95 in a straight line per metre, and worth weighing against a builder that was posting eight-figure losses only three years ago.

What are the accommodation options on the Princess X90?

The X90 ships in two layouts: a four-cabin version with the owner's suite forward and optional private foredeck terrace access, or an alternative five-cabin arrangement that trades that terrace for a fourth guest cabin on the lower deck, both sleeping up to eight guests with three to four crew.

The cockpit is built around curved patio doors that open the space straight into the main saloon, a glass transom balustrade, and fold-down balconies to port and starboard that Princess markets as a beach-club effect. Above that sits the Super Flybridge, with an enclosed primary helm station and a skylounge under panoramic glazing, and the main deck runs single-level from the saloon through to the owner's suite rather than stepping down as on the older X80 layout.

The choice between the two layouts is really a choice of buyer: a private owner is more likely to take the four-cabin version for the private terrace off the owner's suite, while an operator planning to charter the boat gains more from the fifth cabin's extra paying berths. Princess and Pininfarina worked the exterior styling together, with Olesinski's naval architecture underneath; the interior joinery and layout planning stayed in-house at Princess.

What is still unverified about the Princess X90 ahead of its Cannes debut?

Cannes gives the X90 its first public showing, but it will not resolve the two things a serious buyer still needs answered: which of the two published top-speed figures is correct for a given engine option, and what the yacht actually costs.

Every performance figure in circulation today traces back to Princess's own June 2026 trial on the one hull that exists. No third-party sea trial report has been published, and none of the four hulls now under construction has completed testing of its own. That is a normal stage for a boat this new, but it means the 26-versus-28-knot discrepancy, and the untested claim that the hull's efficiency gain holds up across a full range of sea states, both remain open questions rather than settled facts.

The seven buyers who have already committed did so on Princess's word and on the strength of the X80 and X95 track record either side of the X90, not on an independent verification of this specific hull. That is not unusual for how superyacht-adjacent order books work, but it does mean the real price discovery, on performance and on cost, will happen through delivered boats, brokerage listings and resale data over the next year rather than through anything visible at Cannes this week.