A leading travel agency boss has warned river specialists may have to “fight” for bookings in 2023 if pricing as predicted returns to pre-pandemic levels.
Phil Nuttall, owner of The Travel Village Group, noted how lines dropped their prices this year in a bid to drive UK bookings in the absence of Australian and American customers.
Avalon Waterways previously confirmed summer 2022 prices were discounted because passengers from major source markets had been “slower” to return.
Nuttall said: “People must realise that you are not going to see the pricing of 2022 next year. It was just to get people on the ships at a time that Australians and Americans were not travelling.
“We will have to fight for a share of the market. We’ll have to work harder for a booking as there could be less capacity for the UK market now that Australians, Americans and Europeans will be travelling again.”
River lines were hampered by a low number of American customers who were fearful about travelling to Europe after war broke out following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Despite Australia reopening its borders in February, outbound travel from the country has been slow to return amid sky-high air fares.
Travel Village Group is ramping up river cruise activity ahead of wave season with Nuttall placing himself in charge of driving river sales.
“I am now going to pick up the reins,” he said. “River has had a longer dry spell than other products purely because travel is through other countries.
“We’re now ready to go full steam ahead.”
He called river cruise his “passion” and his “baby” before outlining plans to support his agents and believes North America and South America, where AmaWaterways is set to deploy two river ships, could be advantageous for cruise-selling agents.
“I will be working on developing our relationships with cruise lines,” he said. “We want to increase awareness of river cruise. We want to do that by offering educational trip places and hosting in-store training. We’ll be working with Clia on this.”
He added: “River cruise is a great product and I think that 2023 is going to be the reincarnation of river globally. Australians are going be back and that is good for the industry in terms of pricing.”
Nuttall admitted “a lot of work to be done” to transfer ocean cruise passengers over to river.
But he stressed people do “want to experience history” on their holiday, arguing this would help river cruise specialists make bookings.
“2022 has been an extremely difficult year with the amount of air schedule changes,” he said. “Europe has taken a battering. Next year the river cruise sector should be in a much better place.
“River has been slightly marginalised because of the Covid pandemic and the problem that we had with airlines.
“Ocean has been far quicker to get back to some sort of normality. There is going to be some sort of appetite for river.”
He went on to dismiss fears that low water levels could affect booking levels in 2023. “Water levels rising and falling does not come up with customers,” he said.
“River cruise lines can take people off the ship at one point and move their luggage and carry on the journey missing out the lower water.
“We have to find a way of getting round these obstacles.”