Robin Farley, a leisure analyst with UBS Investment Research, reports that cruise pricing is still holding with no significant declines about halfway through Wave Season, despite the Costa Concordia accident. “We note that price changes, which is what we are able to track for 7,000-plus sailings, are a lagging indicator to volume changes,” Farley wrote in the UBS Cruise Data Tracker.

Farley observed that it is quite likely that cruise lines would not discount prices immediately after the Concordia accident, since the immediate volume decline would be expected to be temporary. “We also note that cruise lines are offering other non-ticket pricing incentives, such as onboard credits, to stimulate demand as an alternative to reducing ticket pricing, and we believe that cruise lines would turn to this measure first before reducing ticket prices,” she wrote.

Farley, who regularly tracks cruise fares, said she continues to see no significant sequential declines in average prices, with week-over-week ticket prices looking somewhat flat sequentially for the third straight week, and up about 1 percent since the start of the year.

The UBS Cruise Data Tracker tracks the average of the lowest-priced outside cabins for sailings for the six largest North America-sourcing cruise lines and two of the largest European-sourcing cruise lines, totaling over 7,000 sailings available over all forward quarters. The brands that Farley tracks are Carnival Cruise Lines, Celebrity Cruises, Costa, Cunard, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises and Royal Caribbean International.

Separately, the UBS Cruise Pricing Survey indicates that for the 2012 cruising season, Caribbean cruise prices have been “up moderately over the last two months, with last week coming in flattish week-over-week. Alaska had also been moderately up since the start of the calendar year until two weeks ago, and it was flattish sequentially this past week. Finally, UBS said its checks indicate that Mediterranean cruise pricing has been relatively flat since the downward pricing adjustment in early November, though it has now seen sequential pricing declines in each of the last two weeks.