Tag Archives: Norwegian Getaway

Belizean bliss at Norwegian’s Harvest Caye

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Norwegian Cruise Line’s private island, Harvest Caye, just off the coast of Belize, contains 11 mahogany-trimmed villas that can be rented for the day for $499. Photo Credit: Tom Stieghorst
 
Harvest Caye, a 78-acre island a mile offshore from southern Belize, might be the best in class in the cruise industry’s growing portfolio of privately built destinations in the Bahamas and the Caribbean.

Completed by Norwegian Cruise Line over the course of 31 months, the island has a combination of standout features.

To start with, it has a dock big enough to accommodate a megaship such as the 4,000-passenger Norwegian Getaway, the result of dredging more than a million cubic meters of sea bottom to make a channel.

Not having to tender to a private port makes everything safer, faster and more convenient for guests.

Also, while it feels like an island experience, Harvest Caye is only a 15-minute boat ride from mainland Belize, where available tours include the Mayan archaeological ruins, a tropical spice farm, a savannah ecotour by boat and a rainforest river tubing and rafting excursion. Prices for these experiences top out at $109.

 
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On the island, a nature center displays boa constrictors, scarlet macaws and toucans, the national bird of Belize. Run by Tony Garel, an award-winning naturalist recruited from the Belize Zoo, it is the only such center in a port owned by a cruise line.

One popular zoo feature is a screened butterfly house filled with bobbing, iridescent blue morphos.

 
A branded restaurant adds another dimension to Harvest Caye. The tropically themed, two-story LandShark Bar & Grill was designed by Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Holdings and is operated by local food purveyor Provisions Belize. The restaurant overlooks a 15,000-square-foot pool that, unlike those on most cruise ships, comes with lifeguard supervision.
Harvest Caye’s most visible feature is a 136-foot-tall lighthouse-like structure called the Flighthouse, an anchor for two ziplines, including the 1,300-foot Superman, in which riders fly prone, swooping low over the beach like a jet coming in for a landing at the airport. When both ziplines are running, guest services director Dan Drahozal said they can serve up to 192 people a day.
When a ship arrives around 8 a.m., guests will be greeted by a band playing drums and singing songs from the Afro-Caribbean Garifuna subculture in Belize. On the beach, 2,500 blue-cushioned loungers await.
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To beat the brutal summer heat in Belize, Harvest Caye is outfitted with an abundance of fans, misters and shade umbrellas. A low canopy also protects the pier walk from the ship to the entrance.
Several free-standing locker towers provide storage around the island for $5 a day. Harvest Caye’s shopping village is lushly landscaped with a variety of tropical plants and mostly local vendors, rather than the chains that crowd other ports of call.
Finally, it’s worth noting that many of the Harvest Caye buildings, including the 11 villas that rent out for $499 a day, are trimmed in tropical hardwood milled by a Mennonite community in Belize. It gives a richer-than-expected look to the beach architecture.
“Mahogany is widely used in this country because it’s so abundant,” said Dustin Bowen, CEO of Provisions Belize, “whereas in the [U.S.] it’s scarce and expensive.”

Norwegian CEO: Mediterranean cruising bouncing back

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Photo by Dave Jones; Norwegian Jade in Santorini

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings CEO Frank Del Rio said bookings for the Mediterranean have been strong in the past eight weeks, and that the company’s 2017 results will hinge on whether that continues.

Del Rio said business sourced in North America for the Med is up “strong double digits” across all three of the company’s brands (Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania and Regent Seven Seas Cruises) for the past eight weeks.

He said occupancies are currently flat and that pricing is behind in the Med for the second half of 2017, but that pricing could be up by year’s end if the current trend continues.

Del Rio said that because of the outsized yields of European itineraries, “2017 will greatly depend on the Med.”

In 2017, Norwegian will have 23% of its capacity in Europe, which is up due to the redeployment of the Norwegian Getaway to the Baltic, where demand is strong, Del Rio said.

Del Rio commented in a conference call for analysts held to discuss third-quarter earnings.

In the third quarter, Norwegian reported net income of $342.4 million compared to $251.8 million a year earlier. Revenue rose 15.6% to $1.5 billion.

Ranking cruise lines’ Rio efforts

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Norwegian Getaway in Rio
Three cruise companies made the Rio Olympic Games part of their 2016 strategy, so in the spirit of the competition, it seems only fitting to award them medals for their efforts.

Bronze

Royal Caribbean International is using the Rio games to revive its “Come Seek” TV advertising, which debuted last fall. The choice associates Royal with the international flavor of the Olympics, plus links it with popular athletes such as Michael Phelps and Simone Biles.

Advertisers like Royal spent $1.2 billion on the Olympics, but so far television ratings are down 15.5% from the 2012 games in London, averaging 27.9 million viewers through the first nine nights.

Still, I thought one video was particularly effective. Titled “We Play Games Too,” it shows an aquatic performer on one of Royal’s Oasis-class ships doing a handstand on a diving platform before plunging into what seems like a pool the size of a postage stamp. The ad effectively showcases something that none of Royal’s competitors can duplicate.

Silver

Silversea Cruises, aptly enough, wins the silver for chartering the Silver Cloud as a floating hotel for the U.S. men’s and women’s basketball teams. The charter earned Silversea a boatload of free publicity, including a front-page article in the New York Times.

Sports channels and outlets also picked up on an extended monologue by USA team coach Mike Krzyzewski about staying on the ship, although Chicago Bulls star Jimmy Butler could have shown a little more enthusiasm.

“I just do what I’m told,” Butler said. “I’m told to sleep on a boat, so I sleep on a boat.”

Gold

While Silversea hosted athletes, Norwegian Cruise Line chartered its Norwegian Getaway for use by sports bureaucrats, including members of the International Olympic Federation, the National Organizing Committees, the Rio Host Committee as well as corporate sponsors.

While not as productive on the publicity front, it gave high-ranking influencers from dozens of countries exposure to a cruise ship, and Norwegian in particular, that they might not otherwise have.

Norwegian gained another backhanded benefit. By chartering the Getaway, it removed the 4,000-passenger ship for 40 days from the Miami/Caribbean market, which “helped alleviate some of the pricing pressure” caused by having two big ships in the Miami market during the summer, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings CEO Frank del Rio said.

Norwegian couldn’t have anticipated that effect when it started charter plans for the Rio games nine years ago, but good luck often plays a role in Olympic wins, as it did for Norwegian here.