by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 1:50 PM ET, Fri February 21, 2025
With orders for new ships up year over year, increasingly innovative cruise ship designs being rolled out and a rich variety of new port possibilities around the world, Cruise Lines International Association’s new president is extremely optimistic about the future of the cruise industry.
Charles "Bud" Darr, who stepped into CLIA’s president and CEO role earlier this month, shared his thoughts on these and many other industry developments during an interview with USA Today.
During the interview, Darr characterized the state of the cruise industry as “very sound."
“It is an industry that I think is worthy of a great deal of optimism for the future,” Darr told USA Today.
That optimism is based on hard numbers. According to the CLIA president, the new ship order book for CLIA members is up significantly year-over-year from 51 new ships on order last year to 67 this year.
“So, that's indicative of a great sense of optimism, not just among those that run and own the cruise lines, but it's also among the investment community and lending community that, in the longer term, have to share that optimism – or else we wouldn't see that sort of new construction in the works,” Darr explained.
The cruise industry is also going through some important changes and evolution at the moment, including with regard to the design of cruise ships.
“That's both from a sustainability viewpoint as well as a safety feature viewpoint,” said Darr, explaining that the innovations being made on the guest experience front “are almost breathtaking."
“Every new generation of ships just tends to have more and more features in all of those lanes that help us provide a healthy, safe, secure, environmentally sound value vacation experience that keeps getting more and more interesting,” he said.
The future of cruise vacations may also include a growing focus on private destinations. whether that’s private cruise line-owned islands or what Darr described as “other types of private destinations.”
"I think those offer some unique opportunities because they allow any given cruise line to take advantage of the feedback that we get from guests,” Darr said “And build that into an optimal destination that is principally under the cruise line's own control.”
The development of private destinations also helps ease overcrowding in locations around the world that Darr said “may have a little difficulty managing their tourism flows.”
As for the future of sustainability in the cruise industry, which is no easy issue to address, Darr offered optimism here too.
The industry has set a goal for itself of reaching net-zero emissions by the year 2050, which Darr acknowledged during his interview with USA Today is a “significant challenge in many different ways.”
However, Darr added that he’s “actually pretty confident all of shipping is gonna get there.”
“The common denominator in success or failure ... (is) going to be the availability of the alternative zero, or more likely near-zero, greenhouse gas emission fuels,” explained Darr. “And that is a big question mark because the capacity is not there among the energy providers yet … So that is outside the control of the cruise industry or the rest of the maritime community.”
Darr said, CLIA’s members are investing tens of billions of dollars in ships designed to run on fuels that don't yet exist in the market.
“But keep in mind, pre-pandemic, the average age of a cruise ship that went to recycling was over 40 years. If you think about 2050, you may be just a little past halfway in the life cycle of one of these ships. So we have to be prepared.”
As for new ports on the horizon for the cruise vacation industry, Darr suggested a variety of possibilities.
Topping the locations where travelers are likely to see new port stops is the Mediterranean Sea, suggested Darr.
“There is more and more attraction in the Mediterranean because there are just so many destinations to choose from, and they're culturally so much different depending on which part of the Mediterranean Sea you might be operating in,” Darr said.
“I think there are some great opportunities there that are growing,” he added. They have to grow, of course, in a sustainable and managed way to continue to provide both the guest experience we want and also for us to be good corporate citizens as we serve those communities.”
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