As the year draws to a close, the outlook is bright for Royal Caribbean Group’s premium luxury line Celebrity Cruises.
While the fast-growing cruise brand enjoyed a record 2023 in terms of volume and load factors, Celebrity’s Managing Director and Vice President EMEA, Giles Hawke, told Travel Weekly that he expects 2024 to be even bigger.
Predicting that next year will set new records for Celebrity, he said the line has a higher sales volume for 2024 than it did for 2023 at the same time last year. “This year has been a record year but next year is going to be better,” he said.
The company just debuted its newest cutting-edge (no pun intended) Edge Series ship, Celebrity Ascent this year, having launched Celebrity Beyond just last year. And, while its current success is worthy of celebration, Celebrity isn’t resting on its laurels. The cruise operator has yet another, Celebrity Xcel, in the pipeline, plus Hawke said that it aims to increase load factors even further next year.
“We are already better sold as we go into 2024 than we were going into 2023 in terms of load factor, although we always want more, as a full ship is both the most profitable and the most enjoyable for passengers.” He added, “The combination of how we’ve deployed the fleet plus the launch of Ascent means we will definitely have more passengers on board in 2024.”
While he said “everything is selling well”, Hawke also noted that bookings for Caribbean voyages have been particularly strong of late.” He continued, “Caribbean sales have been driving really hard and we have more demand for sailings that call at Perfect Day at CocoCay in the Bahamas than for any other Caribbean sailings, despite those costing on average $15 more per person per day.
For travel advisors who have clients interested in taking Caribbean or Alaska cruise vacations in 2024, he advised that they encourage them to book quickly, as there is bound to be a “race for space”. Hawke remarked, “I don’t want to say demand is insatiable, but it isn’t far off.”
Hawke’s observations of Celebrity’s current experience jibes with broader findings from a recent Reuters report, which indicated that travelers across all income and budget levels are booking cruises at a record pace.
Meanwhile, Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) announced that an estimated 35.7 million travelers are expected to cruise in 2024, up from 31.5 million in 2023 and six percent higher than the pre-pandemic record volumes of 2019.
Is this merely attributable to so-called “revenge travel” due to the fact that cruising was taken completely off the table during the pandemic? That seems unlikely, given that cruises have been operating since November 2020 when the CDC lifted its “No Sail Order” and without COVID-19 restrictions since January 2022 when its “Conditional Sail Order” was allowed to expire.
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