Expedition cruise operators should “move away” from late discounting and focus on early booking incentives and education for agents, say agents.
At the first Expedition Cruise Network (ECN) conference, ECN chief executive Akvile Marozaite asked four travel agents how expedition cruise operators could “make agents’ lives a bit easier”.
James Turner, commercial director at Wildfoot Travel, said the industry needed “a real and much bigger focus” on incentivising early bookings compared to late discounting.
He added: “We need to go back. Before the pandemic, we could confidently book expedition cruises two years ahead of departure. There was a strong value proposition.
“Clients would be very happy to put their money down and be happy to wait two years, get really excited for their trip and have the most life changing experience.”
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Turner acknowledged issues with “overcapacity” with a lot of new expedition ships built throughout the pandemic.
“We’ve had more capacity than we know what to do with. However, the pandemic was quite a long time ago,” he said.
“What we have seen as a result are crazy discounts flying around in this expedition world. Every week I’m seeing a 50% or 40% discount.”
Turner made a comparison with high-end cars, saying he wouldn’t walk into an Aston Martin garage and expect 50% off.
He urged operators to focus on “strong” early booking offers and campaigns to create guarantees for clients that they are getting the best deal by booking early.
Turner added: “Two years ahead, we should have these ships pretty much full, or at least at 80% capacity a year prior to departure. That’s where we need to get back to.”
This was echoed by all of the panellists, with Emma Sanger-Horwell, head of cruise at Kenwood Travel, saying she “would like us all to move away from that completely”.
She said that while clients loved seeing a late 50% discount on Antarctica cruises, for agents coordinating air and land packages at reasonable prices that close was “a nightmare”.
Sanger-Horwell highlighted clients seeing such a discount this year, would “hold out” for next year expecting the same thing, so “it doesn’t work”.
Alex Loizou, director of sales at Munday Cruising, acknowledged that expedition cruise lines have “a real balancing act” with space to fill which he did not envy.
However, he said: “The lead times for an expedition cruise, we find, are very long. Typically, people book over a year in advance, and people start their research a year in advance of that. Not relying on pushing late space is sensible and being ahead of that curve, because actually, when people start seeing heavily discounted trips, it can be slightly problematic.”
Loizou said expedition cruise operators and travel agents needed to “continue the education on the value” of expedition cruise, to explain why it retails at that price due to the remote locations visited, for example.
John Galligan, owner of John Galligan Travel based in Ireland, said that this tied in with an industry-wide trend in pricing.
“The whole world has gone mad since Covid. There’s been a rebalancing with pricing, where we saw a huge demand and suppliers say: “oh, this is marvellous. We just jack up the price by another 40%,” he said.
“I think the suppliers have overstretched it, not just in cruising, but generally in the world, and I think there is a price resistance, and it’d be nice to see that settled down.”
For expedition cruising specifically, he thought the pricing was “a bit strong” and needed to be “brought to a level that’s more affordable”.
He added that normally in the Irish market, the trend is towards “very late” bookings, but “for some reason” he had more 2026 bookings 18 months in advance than he had ever had previously.
“People are holding out. They are uncertain and unsettled, and I think that when you go in with a very strong price message, people will hold back and see what’s going to happen,” he explained.
While Galligan said “discounting is inevitable”, he added that it would be “better” for the airlines to help by “pricing attractively” to allow agents to “get on with it”.
Pictured left to right: James Turner, commercial director at Wildfoot Travel, Alex Loizou, director of sales at Munday Cruising/Adventures, Emma Sanger-Horwell, head of cruise at Kenwood Travel, John Galligan, owner of John Galligan Travel and Akvile Marozaite, chief excecutive of the Expedition Cruise Network.