Celebrity to reveal further river cruise plans in time for January sales push

Celebrity River Cruises will announce details of its pre and post-cruise options and also “a taste of how it is going to innovate river cruising on land” when it puts its next sailings on sale at the end of January.

Speaking at the launch of fifth Edge-class ship Celebrity Xcel in Miami, president Laura Hodges Bethge said: “Xcel combines small intimate spaces with the excitement of a larger ship.

“On our river programme, we will replicate small and intimate as river vessels are small, and we will deliver excitement via the land element.

“We want our guests to be fully immersed. We don’t want them to just see things, we want them to properly experience them.”

Royal Caribbean Group chief executive Jason Liberty added: “We want to make sure guests aren’t just checking boxes of places they have visited but that they are walking away with real memories.”

The leadership team added that agents should target existing Celebrity guests for the river product and stressed that Celebrity is building its own uniquely-designed vessels to counter misperception that river cruise could be too traditional.

They cited the new “magic pods”, like the Magic Carpet on Celebrity’s Edge-class ocean ships, extending cantilevered over the edges of the river ships, as an example of how Celebrity will be pushing the boundaries.

Liberty added: “We want to make sure that the product goes even further than the marketing so that people are always pleasantly surprised.”

Liberty said the first Celebrity river cruise tickets had sold out within six seconds, which indicated Celebrity guests trusted the company to also get the project right.

“It’s because of the trust our customers have in us that we’ve built the best entry point into this market through one of our existing brands,” he said, adding a river cruise product was all part of the Royal Caribbean Group’s strategy to be the best leisure travel company.

“We want to be the company that offers the best leisure experiences anywhere. We know we’re competing against concerts like Taylor Swift, or Mickey Mouse or other land-based offerings,” he said.

“But we know that when they are not sailing with us, they are doing additional vacation experiences so we want to offer more that interests them.

“The opportunity for us is how we can continue to take more share of the travel leisure space.”

Liberty added that building more private islands for the company’s ocean lines was also key to this goal.

“We’re going from two to eight by 2028,” he said.

“We’ll open the next one – our Royal Beach Club in the Bahamas – in 30-40 days.”

Liberty said a new private island in Santorini would enable the company to create “the ultimate Santorini day”.

Explaining it would be used by all three brands, he said: “Desire to go to Santorini is really high. It’s a gorgeous place which people have seen in lots of movies. They want to take pictures of the white buildings with blue domes but when they come back from the island, their experience hasn’t always matched their expectations.

“But on our private island, throughout the course of the day we will spread the impact of the guests.”.

Liberty added Royal Caribbean Group currently had more than 100 projects underway to “help spread out the vacation experience” from congested hotspots.

“We’re looking at how we enrich the places and communities we visit and lessen the concentration on a small number of places,” he said. “We know we bring economic value but we need to be responsible too.”

He said the group was also “obsessed” with reducing fuel consumption, carbon emissions and impact on marine life.