Royal Caribbean has restarted its "wave" marketing campaign for the busy peak season after the company decided to suspend marketing efforts in the wake of the Costa Concordia disaster.
Royal Caribbean decided to stop marketing out of respect to the victims of the Concordia, which sank off the coast of Italy on January 13.
Royal Caribbean feels now is the time to resume marketing campaigns once more and is offering thousands of free flights for summer cruises. The new campaign will focus on ads on television, radio and print.
Royal Caribbean's General Manager in the United Kingdom, Jo Rzymowska, spoke about the decision, "It’s up to us to work with our trade partners and get the message to the consumers that this was an awful, very rare but terrible accident and we as an industry are doing everything we can to make sure it never happens again."
“We needed to be sensitive about what happened and the immediate decision to stop all activity was not a difficult one. It was crystal clear to us in the light of the tragedy that was the right thing to do."
“From then on we have monitored things day by day by getting sentiment from the market, and a lot of that we did by talking to our trade partners. We feel that February 1 is the right time to go out with our own activity.”
The resumed campaign will last throughout February and offer 10,000 free flights for summer 2012 sailing across Royal Caribbean’s European program of cruise itineraries.
