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Even Disney have announced they are offering domestic UK cruises this summer!


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So today Disney cruise line have announced they will be offering domestic UK cruises for the 2021 summer season joining a very long list of cruise lines to announce UK cruises to restart this summer (P&O, Cunard, MSC, Princess, Viking, and now Disney). I wonder why Royal haven’t announced any yet? And given the fact they are legally able to resume from May 17th and they have announced several other cruises resuming elsewhere from June onwards, I don’t understand why they haven’t announced any to resume in the UK yet?

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11 minutes ago, Brogan said:

So today Disney cruise line have announced they will be offering domestic UK cruises for the 2021 summer season joining a very long list of cruise lines to announce UK cruises to restart this summer (P&O, Cunard, MSC, Princess, Viking, and now Disney). I wonder why Royal haven’t announced any yet? And given the fact they are legally able to resume from May 17th and they have announced several other cruises resuming elsewhere from June onwards, I don’t understand why they haven’t announced any to resume in the UK yet?

Probably hoping to sail with established cruises.

Something may be in the works for Harmony based on circumstantial evidence.  

Ships in that region are Jewel, Anthem and Harmony.  Jewel is spoken for.  Anthem and Harmony are options but may have limited ports to call on in the UK due to size.

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54 minutes ago, twangster said:

Anthem and Harmony are options but may have limited ports to call on in the UK due to size.

And of those two, I would guess Harmony is the more-limited ship in that regard (required draft, docks that can handle her length / size / height, etc). But IIRC, Harmony would be "new" for the UK where Anthem has already been sailing from there for a few years. So I'd wager on Royal drumming up higher interest through putting Harmony in Southampton and finding another place (if any right now) for Anthem.

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My personal view is if they wait a short number of weeks then RCI will know a lot more about europe/uk going ons....

Harmony was due out of barcelona/Rome and Spain is certainly wanting to open up (along with portugal) ... Anthem existing sailings heavily involve Spain, Portugal etc...

I would say Spain, Portugal et al are waiting to see what uk travel review comes up with and that will help shape a view on European sailings and that review is only a couple of weeks away.

Well I'm hoping existing sailings happen as British weather is not as good as the Med!

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Question: if existing sailings start up this summer for Anthem/Harmony (with the odd itinerary changes etc..) - how will RCI deal with reducing occupancy?  I know this would be a total guess, but what/how do people think they will do this?

As I think if this is about to happen anywhere I think Europe is topping my list of guessing...

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What is harder for us cruise guests to see are the economics of each ship involved.  

Newer ships have economies of scale but they also have a threshold below which it wouldn't make sense to operate.  If the cutoff to break even is 2,500 guests as a SWAG on either ship, can they sustain that load over two months every week?  Maybe they can reach that load on the first two cruises but can't sustain that load for the entire "season" every week.

Operating the ship but losing tens of thousands each week doesn't make business sense.  

I'm not saying that is the forecast but it's an unknown that is really hard for us mere guests to understand. 

 

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7 minutes ago, twangster said:

Operating the ship but losing tens of thousands each week doesn't make business sense.  

Unless leaving the ship with a skeleton crew in a warm shutdown is costing them hundreds of thousands a week, in which case losing tens of thousands instead is a worthy trade-off. Not sure if that kind of info is available for a proper comparison, but that's certainly one reason I could see for making that kind of business decision. As you said, it's really hard to know as a guest.

But they could truly be making a decision not so much of, "Ship 1 would cost us $50,000 a week to operate while Ship 2 will make us an average $5,000 a week in profit", as "Ship 1 is costing us $125,000 a week to leave in warm shutdown and Ship 2 is costing us $175,000; at best, we can offset $100,000 a week average with X% guest capacity on either one, so let's pick the ship that we're most sure can maintain that guest count the best."

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7 minutes ago, JLMoran said:

Unless leaving the ship with a skeleton crew in a warm shutdown is costing them hundreds of thousands a week, in which case losing tens of thousands instead is a worthy trade-off. Not sure if that kind of info is available for a proper comparison, but that's certainly one reason I could see for making that kind of business decision. As you said, it's really hard to know as a guest.

But they could truly be making a decision not so much of, "Ship 1 would cost us $50,000 a week to operate while Ship 2 will make us an average $5,000 a week in profit", as "Ship 1 is costing us $125,000 a week to leave in warm shutdown and Ship 2 is costing us $175,000; at best, we can offset $100,000 a week average with X% guest capacity on either one, so let's pick the ship that we're most sure can maintain that guest count the best."

The "floor" operating costs of warm layup don't include higher fuel consumption or numerous medical staff who are not inexpensive positions or the hundreds of crew required for guests or the additional supplies required.

As guest count increases so do operating costs.  More crew, more food, more fuel compared to sitting at anchor running on one engine with no guests on board.

It's pretty obvious that to have 10 guests on the ship with the increased fuel sailing somewhere, crew and supplies they would lose more money compared to sitting at anchor empty of guests.  

it's equally evident that with 5,000 guests they make a boat load of money compared to sitting at anchor empty of guests.

Somewhere between 10 and 5,000 is a point on a graph where they stop losing more money compared to remaining at anchor.  

None of us know where that point on the graph is but Royal does.

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I can just see the scenario whereby these summer cruises have been booked out with people moving holidays from last summer.  I can remember thinking at the time that i moved my cruise a year forward, that last years cruise could still have run...it never crossed my mind that we'd be in the situation of questioning whether or not this years would run...

At some point RCI will decide to run existing sailings, and I reckon they will have a higher occupancy than their health protocols would allow for...who gets to cruise and who gets cancelled...wonder whether they'll try to avoid this or attempt it...

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1 hour ago, em.down.the.rabbit.hole said:

Question: if existing sailings start up this summer for Anthem/Harmony (with the odd itinerary changes etc..) - how will RCI deal with reducing occupancy?  I know this would be a total guess, but what/how do people think they will do this?

As I think if this is about to happen anywhere I think Europe is topping my list of guessing...

Initially the vaccination requirement may do a bit of weeding out since people who don't want to get vaccinated or are unable to do so in time will have to cancel.

The other way I can see is that cancelling a whole programme, such as we have just seen done with Adventure and Jewel allows the new itineraries to be capacity controlled.

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On 3/26/2021 at 2:48 PM, FionaMG said:

For those who didn't get to see it, this is the circumstantial evidence.

I saw the original but this photo was posted by a poster over on CC.

5C77AA53-A34E-457C-B96E-90CC31E417BC.thumb.png.ae7f1cf5f8cc5d0213ceacbae06d78e5.png.a43e6cdfd619616a8cbc3f4623568692.png

I think Marc Walker has deleted this post now. When did he post it? Would be pretty big news if they did put Harmony in Southampton and this post definitely hints at that.

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33 minutes ago, Brogan said:

I think Marc Walker has deleted this post now. When did he post it? Would be pretty big news if they did put Harmony in Southampton and this post definitely hints at that.

It was on Monday of this week (22nd). By the next day it was gone.

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