Royal Caribbean International plans to expand its “destination footprint” and offer more private islands around the world after pausing land-based projects during the pandemic.
In 2019, the line said it expected to open five ‘Perfect Day’ private islands before 2023, but Covid-19 forced Royal into a re-think.
The line confirmed it had paused private destination projects over the course of the pandemic during the company’s last earnings call. It has previously said sites in Asia, Australia and the Caribbean would be announced.
Currently, Perfect Day at CocoCay remains the only private island open to Royal’s cruise passengers.
Perfect Day at Lelepa, Vanuatu, which is expected to be the first carbon neutral private destination in the world, will welcome cruise passengers next year.
However, speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast this week, outgoing Royal Caribbean Group chief executive Richard Fain said the development of projects “beyond the confines of the ship” would be ramped-up.
Fain was joined on the webcast by chief financial officer Jason Liberty, who will assume his role in January.
Liberty, who has been leading Royal’s strategic planning team for 13 of his 16 years at the cruise company, said: “We are growing our fleet and we’ve got 13 ships on order, but you will continue to see us expanding our destination footprint.
“We think it’s a great opportunity to enhance the experience.”
Fain said the Royal Caribbean Group, which also runs Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises, was “no longer looking at the experience as simply as a shipboard activity”.
“The experience now is much broader than that,” he explained. “It includes the things we’re doing on land, sustainability, technology and investments.
“Technology is probably something you’ll see a lot of in the coming years. While we did some pausing during the pandemic, we’ve geared it back up and moving quickly ahead.”
Fain predicted that the so-called ‘new normal’ would be the ‘old normal’ and the cruise sector would never remain static.
He added operations were returning “very quickly” to where they were prior to the pandemic.
Asked whether customer sentiment was behind the company’s efforts to make operations greener, Liberty said: “We need to continue to deliver these phenomenal vacations but also transform our environmental footprint.
“As long as I have been here we’ve been very focused on how we can reduce our impact on the environment.
He said that focussing on the environment was “less” to do with reacting to customer demand, but “because it is the right thing to do”. Fain added: “We have stakeholders and [sustainability] is important to them.”
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