Nearly 65% of Royal Caribbean International’s passengers will call into the line’s private island destination Perfect Day at CocoCay in the Bahamas next year, the parent company says.
Jason Liberty, president of the line’s parent Royal Caribbean Group, revealed the figure – up from 30% in 2019 – during the quarterly results call last week.
Perfect Day at CocoCay is currently the only private island destination in Royal Caribbean’s portfolio, but the line has recently outlined plans to develop more sites.
He noted the company-wide fleet deployment was “relatively unchanged” over the past four years.
More: Royal Caribbean reports ‘better than expected’ third quarter results
“Our deployment across markets is relatively unchanged compared to 2019 with Caribbean representing just over half of our overall deployment, Europe at almost 20%, and Asia in the low single digits,” he said.
The company expects “almost 80%” of 2023 guest sourcing to come from North America. “We continue to see particularly strong demand from that customer,” he said.
“Our global brands appeal and nimble sourcing model allow us to attract the highest-yielding guests and partially mitigate the impact from the strong dollar.”
Liberty (pictured) said the “most notable change” during the last quarter had been “a substantial acceleration in demand” for 2023 sailings.
“We received twice as many bookings for 2023 sailings in Q3, as we did in Q2, resulting in considerably higher booking volumes than during the same period for 2019 sailings,” he added.
Liberty went on to say that all four quarters of 2023 were “booked well” at “record prices”, with bookings increasing “every week”.
“While the last three years were certainly challenging. The resiliency of our business allowed us to recover quickly and be fully back up and running,” he said.
“The value proposition of cruising remains incredibly attractive and we have an opportunity to close the gap to other land vacation alternatives as we grow our market.”
Liberty said the company was seeing “strength” in Europe but added: “We’re more focused on the Mediterranean area that’s where we see the strength in the bookings.”