Avoid Frequent Use of the Health Sail Center Page if You Want Protocols to be Reduced!

[AspiringCruisePlanner]

I listened to the RCI earnings call for Q4 2021 and heard an interesting response from Michael Bayley regarding protocols and a return to normal.

Quote

 

"We believe that we're going to move into a much more positive environment.  I think what we'll see as we get into that environment we'll start, again, working with the CDC, we'll start removing many of the protocols that exist today and it will become easier and simpler for our customers.

Just as a point of reference around 10 million customers visit our Royal Caribbean International website every month and around 400 thousand or so visit our health sail section of that.  And you can see as people's anxiety either raises or decreases, then obviously that number raises and decreases."

 

I'm wondering whether Bayley and Royal Caribbean are actually determining people's anxiety about cruising off of the traffic on their Health Sail Center page?  Or am I interpreting this statement wrong and he's merely saying that lower overall website traffic indicates more anxiety about cruising.

If they are basing anxiety levels off of traffic to the Healthy Sail Center page, I think they are drawing a false conclusion.  IMO, a high level of traffic to the protocols page indicate people are concerned about understanding and adhering to the protocols so that they can get on the ship rather than verifying whether appropriate protocols exist i.e. "I'm worried that they might not require masking on the ship".  Certainly both scenarios exist, but trying to use the Healthy Sail Center page traffic as a measure of how concerned people are about protocols/safe cruising is not the best indication.

Mr. Bayley said this as color commentary to a question and I know that they have other measures of gauging people's confidence in cruising and the existing protocols.  The title of this topic is very tongue-in-cheek, but Bayley's comments have me concerned about the conclusions they are trying to draw from the site traffic.  I'll keep following Matt's blog posts for up-to-date information on protocols 

[smokeybandit]

So only 4% of their website traffic is the healthy sail section?

[AspiringCruisePlanner]

According to what he said, yes. I was surprised too.

[twangster]

Royal does surveys specifically about protocols but they also get comments on the standard post cruise surveys.  

I don’t think they can draw conclusions from a simple metric of site traffic.  That traffic could look at the protocols and decide not to cruise or decide to cruise based on protocols.    Simply visiting the site doesn't provide enough insight to know the outcome of the visit.  

His response is aimed at investors and analysts.   You can’t extrapolate that into their position on changing protocols from a cruiser perspective.