Cruising will return to long-term growth after overcoming its immediate challenges, according to the boss of Fred Olsen Cruise Lines.
Explaining on a Travel Weekly webcast why he had been confident to buy two 1,400-passenger ships during the crisis, managing director Peter Deer said: “We believe in cruising in the long term in the UK and that was really the first starting point for me.
“As a business we said, what is the long-term future of cruising? We believe it will carry on and grow for many years. We have a few challenges today, but if you look outside of those challenges, what you’ve seen over the last 10 or 15 years is huge growth in terms of guest numbers. And I believe in five to 10 years’ time, we’ll see lots of growth again.”
Deer added: “As a cruise line which hasn’t grown much in the last few years, this was a great opportunity to grow our capacity and be back in there and actually taking a market share from UK cruising. So we worked really hard to do it that stage.”
Fred Olsen Cruise Lines bought the vessels previously known as Amsterdam and Rotterdam from Holland America Line and announced last week that the re-named Bolette and Borealis would replace Boudicca and Black Watch, which will leave the fleet.
The new tonnage will increase the line’s total capacity by 30%.
Deer said: “We took the early decision that we couldn’t continue our operations as was, for the obvious reasons. We were then sitting there thinking, ‘right, we’re in a situation where our ships are not performing. They’re not in operation so what do we do next’?
“But against all the downside of the travel industry at the time, I’ve always got a view in life that with every push comes at pull, and with every up comes a down. So I thought to myself, what can we actually do to see a long-term upside because in in the short term, there’s very little can be done. So I could see that there could be opportunities to acquire additional ships.”
Deer said that buying just one ship would not have given him the capacity increase to really take UK market share, which is something he wanted to do.
“Part of my strategy to do this was to increase the number of passengers we can sail with and therefore, increase market share. Buying two meant a 30% increase in passenger capacity. The good thing with Bolette and Borealis – they are still, as our customers describe, a small ship under the magic 1,500 passenger mark,” he said.
“Balmoral is about 1,375. These are 1,410 – something like that. And we find on Balmoral it’s still easy enough to find your way around, find friends on board, know the bars you do like and where you want to go on board.”