Azamara Club Cruises will offer free companion air for flights booked in conjunction with more than 100 cruises in 2015-16.
The offer applies to bookings of Club Oceanview staterooms or higher. Also, the booking must be made from June 2 to July 31 with full deposit.
Agents must register offer code “FreeAir2ndGuest” in the reservation at the time of booking, and the offer is only applicable for select U.S. and Canadian international gateways, Azamara said.
The news that Royal Caribbean International is putting its new ship in China made a big splash. But sometimes it takes a surprising development to show an underlying trend that has been slowly taking shape for years.
The North American share of the world cruise passenger base has been declining, even though in absolute terms it is growing and it still remains far larger than any other source market.
Cruise lines are hungry for new growth, and China is the current gravy train that everyone is hoping to ride. But it isn’t only China. While the Quantum of the Seas is headed for Shanghai, Royal’s Voyager and Rhapsody of the Seas are spending a good part of the year taking Australians on vacations from Sydney.
And Royal is hardly alone. Carnival Cruise Lines is sending its Legend of the Seas to Australia later this year too.
Some higher-end cruise lines, such as Azamara Club Cruises, draw more than 50% of their passengers from outside North America.
The international sourcing of passengers is drawing industry attention and resources away from its historical roots in the U.S. and Canada. Cruise officials take pains to assert that North America remains a vital interest for the cruise industry and takes a back seat to no region.
It is obviously true, and yet there is a shift going on that can’t be ignored. It has implications for passengers, for travel agents, suppliers and employees of the cruise lines.
Driving the decision to diversify internationally is the public ownership of the big North American lines. The loyalties of the management of those companies isn’t to country, region or tradition as much as it is to the shareholders that they work for. As Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. President Adam Goldstein told me, it is the shareholder’s interest in long-term profit growth that was the primary factor in deploying the Quantum full time to China.
Ironically, as Royal and other U.S.-based cruise lines are looking abroad, privately owned MSC Cruises is knocking on the door, trying to gain more purchase in North America.
MSC is the line adding to its sales force, making its pitch to travel agents here to funnel clients to its small but growing North American capacity. So even as the U.S. loses a new ship (after a short season in New York) it may soon gain a new ship from a Swiss company with an Italian product.
Call it two faces of the same coin, both manifesting the further globalization of the cruise industry.
As Russia annexed Crimea and the Ukraine government began to withdraw its military personnel from the peninsula this week, travel suppliers began cancelling visits to Ukraine and Russia, as well as to Crimean destinations.
Cruise lines have begun altering some of their Black Sea sailings to bypass previously scheduled port stops in Odessa, Sevastopol and Yalta.
Windstar, Oceania, MSC, Regent Seven Seas and Azamara have substituted port calls in alternative countries, including Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.
Silversea canceled calls to the Crimean peninsula for the April 25 Black Sea sailing of the Silver Wind and for the July 21 departure of the Silver Spirit. However, should the situation in Crimea improve, the line said it would consider returning to its original itineraries.
Viking Cruises has a 12-day Footsteps of the Cossacks river cruise on the 196-passenger Viking Sineus, which sails from Kiev into the heart of the Crimean peninsula, with port stops in Sevastopol and Yalta. But its Ukraine departures begin in May, and the company has yet to decide if it will cancel any sailings.
“Though we know our passengers are paying attention to the developments on the ground, we have not yet seen significant cancellations,” Richard Marnell, Viking’s senior vice president of marketing, wrote in an email.
During a speech earlier this month at a dinner event to celebrate the christening of its latest generation of river cruise ships, Viking Cruises Chairman Torstein Hagen said that while nearly all of Viking’s river cruise capacity through the end of October was sold out, space was still available on its Ukraine sailings.
Many tour operators have already canceled either part or all of their 2014 tour itineraries that include stops in Crimea, offering affected passengers refunds or the option to rebook travel elsewhere.
Globus canceled all 2014 departures of its Ukraine and Crimea tour; Insight Vacations is no longer offering its 12-day Ukraine, Moldova and Crimea tour; and Intrepid Travel has canceled three Ukraine departures through mid-June.
Wetravel2u's Weblog 