Cruise & Maritime Voyages (CMV) is the name of a new kid on the block on the UK cruise market. The Dartford based company that has acted as general sales agent for Louis and Transocean, will set up a new operation next year and bring the 22,080 gross ton Marco Polo and the 17,600 gross ton Ocean Countess to the British market on year-round basis.
Marco Polo will be based in Tilbury near London, while Ocean Countess that was built in 1976 as Cunard Countess, will operate from a number of ports - Plymouth, Liverpool, Greenock, Leith, Newcastle and Hull.
Obviously, this will be an entry level operation, or a budget market one, if you so prefer. In the US, budget operators disappeared with the collapse of Premier Cruises in the aftermath of 911. Germany has traditionally been the stronghold of the operator that charters ships on contracts of various durations and terms and focuses on just the commercial side of the business.
Given the number and size of new ships that will enter service on the British market next year, CMV's move could be seen as daring. Celebrity Cruises will introduce the 122,000 gross ton Celebrity Eclipse; P&O Cruises their 116,000 gross ton Azura and Cunard Line the 90,000 gross ton Queen Elizabeth.
Well, there will be some deductions as well: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines will decommission the 43 year old Black Prince in the autumn as will Saga Cruises their one year older Saga Rose. The two Ocean Village ships will migrate to Australia, so all the newcomers are not just net increase in the supply.
But then there are second hand arrivals as well: Saga Pearl II will join the Saga fleet in April and Thomson Cruises will introduce Thomson Dream, the present day Costa Europa the same month. So, prior to the CMV news, four ships were scheduled to leave and five to enter the British cruise market over the next 18 months. Now the number of newcomers has climbed to seven.
CMV say they want to offer a small ship experience and to bring their ships close to where people live, so that they do not need to travel to Southampton or Dover to join their cruise and make the journey in the opposite direction after their holiday is over.
It is probably here that CMV has a niche to captalise on: Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines and to some extent Saga Cruises have been among the very few operators that have sailed from regional UK ports. Thomson Cruises used to do this as well, but they will position all their six ships to the Mediterranean next year and fly passengers from various British airports to join them.
CMV and its German counterparts differ in a few significant ways from their failed US counterparts, such as Premier Cruises or the mid-1990s casualty called Regency Cruises. CMV and its counterparts firstly do not own their ships but they charter them, whereas the US lines mentioned earlier owned their ships too.
While CMV has not as yet published its 2010 itineraries, at least some of its cruises are long ones, in October Marco Polo will sail on a 32-night Caribbean return voyage from Tilbury. Premier and Regency competed head-on on the same seven-night markets as their significantly larger and stronger competitors.
That said, the UK market probably differs from the US one in that in Britain there are at least in relative to the size of the market more long cruises than in the US.
Still, the year 2010 promises to be an interesting one on the UK cruise scene: CMV's arrival will add 27,000 beds to the supply side. It may sound like much, but it is not really: Celebrity Eclipse alone adds 40,000 beds that the industry needs to sell next year.
Showing posts with label maritime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maritime. Show all posts
Friday, 14 August 2009
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Norwegian Cruise Line's long path to recovery
Norwegian cruise Line (NCL)reported a 2Q09 net profit of $15.2 million earlier this week, much better than the $5.4 million it earned in the previous three months and a significant improvement from the $27.0 million loss the company had suffered a year earlier.
A lot of the recovery came from lower costs, but CEO Kevin Sheehan had something positive to say. Firstly, he belives that the decline in ticket prices has come to an and and the latest figures already indicated that people spend moreon board their ships than what they had done before.
So far so good!
NCL has had a rough ride in the recent past. The launch of NCL America, a US flag operation in the Hawaii islands that was meant to generate high returns as a year-round premium priced operation, did exactly the opposite.
This was not the first time the NCL management has had an issue of strategic nature on its plate, which has taken an awful lot of resources to sort out. In 1980, the intyroduction of SS Norway was hailed as a true coup and indeed for a while, it put NCL in the very forefront of the Caribbean cruise industry. That is, the SS Norway was there.
The ship was roughly of equal tonnage than the other four vessels of the company put together. If you think what Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) or what is Royal Caribbean International (RCI) today did in that period, there is a marked difference to NCL.
CCL in particular increased the number of ships rather than the size of them in its early years. RCI was mare aggressive to grow the size of its vessels too - and still is - but as all their ships were designed and built for them , certain similarities could be retained in the ambiance of the fleet.
NCL's great leap forward negated it this possibility to gradual, step by step growth. As the industry developed, a pattern of success had become obviouys by the mid-1990s. You would need big ships to have economies of scale on the ship level and many, preferrably similar vessels to obtain the same on the corporate level.
Throughout the 1990s, NCL was left to compete against CCL and RCI with a fleeet that was falling further and further behind each time either competititor introduced a newbuilding. By the end of the decade the situation had become critical. With Norwegian Sky and Norwegian Sun NCL had its first modern, large vessels, but the fleet mainly consisted of old and small units that were no match in competition against CCL and RCI.
The NCL product had become a watered down version of that of their competition, which only added to the worries of the then top brass. The introduction of Freestyle Cruising by the company early this decade gave it spark that it had been lacking for a long time and all of a sudden, the NCL brand was fashionable again.
Today, it has a modern, consistent fleet and the revamped Freestyle Cruising product continues to provide a platform on which the company should be able to build its future success. Norwegian Epic, at 150,000 gross tons, is its sole newbuilding on order at the moment. It is far larger than any other ship in the fleet. There seems to be no indication that the newcomer would cannibalise sales of cruises on NCL's other ships.
Let us hope that it will not prevent future investment in ships - probably not of the same size as the Epic - that will help the company to grow without compromising flexibility in fleet deployment.
A lot of the recovery came from lower costs, but CEO Kevin Sheehan had something positive to say. Firstly, he belives that the decline in ticket prices has come to an and and the latest figures already indicated that people spend moreon board their ships than what they had done before.
So far so good!
NCL has had a rough ride in the recent past. The launch of NCL America, a US flag operation in the Hawaii islands that was meant to generate high returns as a year-round premium priced operation, did exactly the opposite.
This was not the first time the NCL management has had an issue of strategic nature on its plate, which has taken an awful lot of resources to sort out. In 1980, the intyroduction of SS Norway was hailed as a true coup and indeed for a while, it put NCL in the very forefront of the Caribbean cruise industry. That is, the SS Norway was there.
The ship was roughly of equal tonnage than the other four vessels of the company put together. If you think what Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) or what is Royal Caribbean International (RCI) today did in that period, there is a marked difference to NCL.
CCL in particular increased the number of ships rather than the size of them in its early years. RCI was mare aggressive to grow the size of its vessels too - and still is - but as all their ships were designed and built for them , certain similarities could be retained in the ambiance of the fleet.
NCL's great leap forward negated it this possibility to gradual, step by step growth. As the industry developed, a pattern of success had become obviouys by the mid-1990s. You would need big ships to have economies of scale on the ship level and many, preferrably similar vessels to obtain the same on the corporate level.
Throughout the 1990s, NCL was left to compete against CCL and RCI with a fleeet that was falling further and further behind each time either competititor introduced a newbuilding. By the end of the decade the situation had become critical. With Norwegian Sky and Norwegian Sun NCL had its first modern, large vessels, but the fleet mainly consisted of old and small units that were no match in competition against CCL and RCI.
The NCL product had become a watered down version of that of their competition, which only added to the worries of the then top brass. The introduction of Freestyle Cruising by the company early this decade gave it spark that it had been lacking for a long time and all of a sudden, the NCL brand was fashionable again.
Today, it has a modern, consistent fleet and the revamped Freestyle Cruising product continues to provide a platform on which the company should be able to build its future success. Norwegian Epic, at 150,000 gross tons, is its sole newbuilding on order at the moment. It is far larger than any other ship in the fleet. There seems to be no indication that the newcomer would cannibalise sales of cruises on NCL's other ships.
Let us hope that it will not prevent future investment in ships - probably not of the same size as the Epic - that will help the company to grow without compromising flexibility in fleet deployment.
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