NCL making changes to up coming Prima Class ships

[JasonOasis]

Just this week NCL announced the 3rd and 4th Prima Class ships would be 10% larger than Prima and the 5th and 6th ships would be at least 20% larger than the current vessel. 

NCL's CEO claims the larger ships are needed to accommodate larger fuel tanks.  However a company executive who spoke after the CEO revealed that push to go bigger is to achieve better economics with Prima Class vessels.

Now If I'm not mistaken NCL's Prima Class was purposely designed smaller than other newer ships in NCL's fleet because NCL was looking to try and position themselves as a more upscale cruise line a step above Royal and MSC and as such they thought smaller would be the way to go.  In 2019 when talking about Prima NCL was convinced bigger was not better and they wanted to go smaller because they believed their customers wanted a more upscale and elegant experience. NCL wanted to send Prima Class ships to destinations/ports mega ships could not visit and believed customers would pay a premium for the experience.  

Well fast forward to 2023 and now NCL is saying the economics of Prima (now that she is in service) and upcoming Viva in their current smaller size are not working as expected and they now need to make the remaining 4 ships larger. Although Prima kicked off its inaugural season to rave reviews from both critics and passengers alike it hasn't helped NCL's bottom line. 

The company didn't reveal if the 3rd Prima Class ship would be delivered on-time, but it did reveal the 4th, 5th and 6th Prima Class ship deliveries would all be delayed by at least 1 year as NCL works on redesigning the last 3 ships.  The company also revealed the redesign isn't cheap either it will cost NCL $1.27 billion dollars.  

The 3rd Prima Class ship wasn't mentioned so I don't know if that ship will simply be stretched but essentially remain the same as Prima and Viva but with more staterooms.  Perhaps it is already too late to redesign the 3rd Prima Class ship so she will only be 10% larger but essentially the same.

 https://thepointsguy.com/news/norwegian-prima-class-ships-bigger/

 

I know a couple months ago in a different thread there were questions about Royal and smaller ships and twangster posted the economics of smaller don't work don't work for companies like Royal. It would appear as though twangster was right, and times have changed and the economics of smaller ships don't work for cruise lines like Royal or even NCL. 

Cruise lines don't just decide to build a brand new class of ship on a whim, they spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars doing R&D.  I've sailed with NCL quite a few times there are a fantastic cruise line (although they do nickel and dime you to death once onboard).  However, when I think of NCL, premium cruise line doesn't come to my mind, so how did NCL after years and millions of dollars invested in  R&D get it wrong Prima Class?  How to they go from bigger isn't better in 2019 to now in 2023 not only making the last 4 ships 10% and 20% bigger but now also having to redesign the 4th, 5th, and 6th ship to the tune of $1.27 billion dollars?

[smokeybandit]

Interesting since they're lagging pretty far behind Carnival and RC for getting capacities back to normal.

[Plumlee2028]

Its not uncommon to change classes once they start.  Celebrity stretched Edge and Apex with beyond and now Ascent in a similarly large increase. Freedom class at Royal is a stretched and enhanced Voyager class realistically (If I remember, marketing may have called it "ultra-voyager" or some such back in the day).  The next round of Prima class will have around 300 more people, not to dissimilar from the Edge/Apex to Beyond/Ascent comparison.  Prima is pretty big for the number of passengers it holds.  I think they have realized they can have more passengers for similar operating costs without changing the desired customer experience.   (the redesign costs were surprisingly high to me.  I dont know anything about that, just stuck out as large).     

[Al Miller]

NCL cant get out of its own way. Del Rio might not be long for retirement. He's made poor calls all through the restart IMO. Maybe in the long term they will be fine but I'll bet shareholders are getting worried at this point. 

[BrianB]

This is similar to NCL’s gamble for the Asian market when they introduced the Joy. She was specifically designed primarily for that market and was expected to be the ship of choice sailing from China.

Well, that gamble failed. NCL was forced to spend $50,000,000 more renovating a brand new ship to bring it back to the US market.

As I remember, at the post-Covid start up… NCL’s DelRio stated they would keep prices high which would result in fewer bookings. But they counted on their loyal customers to keep coming back regardless. He felt at that point, the demand for cruising was so high that having less capacity at higher prices would be more profitable. I remember he said something about how difficult it is to raise prices after lowering them to attract new customers. Doesn’t make sense to me. Pushing away prospective, new customers with high prices. Not to mention the increased spending onboard. It seems everything onboard costs much more.

Screwing over loyal customers would make them try elsewhere…and take their loyalty with them. I did.

[DanielMallorca85]

[Rackham]

So Prima 3 & 4 will be about Freedom-class size while 5 & 6 will be slightly larger than Quantum Ultra?

Will be interesting to see what's next for Royal as ships age out of the fleet. Though from what I recall, Royal has enough cabin capacity coming online over the next several years that they could retire both Vision and Radiance classes and end up with more capacity than before 2024.

[foxrunner]

On 3/11/2023 at 9:02 PM, Rackham said:

So Prima 3 & 4 will be about Freedom-class size while 5 & 6 will be slightly larger than Quantum Ultra?

Will be interesting to see what's next for Royal as ships age out of the fleet. Though from what I recall, Royal has enough cabin capacity coming online over the next several years that they could retire both Vision and Radiance classes and end up with more capacity than before 2024.

The capacity is one thing but what about price? If royal phases out the older smaller ships where is a customer going to find a value based cruise? Maybe they don't care given the financial stressors brought on by the pandemic.  I would think they would want to hold on to the value mass market cruisers instead of having them migrate else where. 

Interestingly NCL isn't positioning itself to attract these customers either. Maybe the whale tail or those Euro lines will win??