Cruises need to drop prices!
 

Just an observation. Was just surfing web for a Winter cruise, perhaps the Panama canal. WOW on the prices...So an open letter to the Cruise industry. Listen up!

If you want passengers to return, to keep part of your crews employed and part of your fleet sailing...YOU NEED TO REDUCE YOUR PRICES.

Econ 101. A reduction in price leads to an increase in demand. End of rant.

Not always. It depends on on many other factors, including the elasticity of demand. If it is close to zero (at the moment no one is getting on a cruise ship) changing prices does not move the demand needle. My guess is that those afraid to get on a boat won't do it at $$$$ and won't do it at $$ either.

High(er) fares are there to soak up all the in-lieu-of-cash-refund FCC credit bonus.

Exactly. Cruises have a captive audience with all these credits. Either you use the credit for the sky-high fare or lose it by the end of the term. Cruises can simply wait it out.

Wait it out??? NCL may go belly-up. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/norw...g-concern.html

Depends
 

If NCL dies, there will be more market share for CCL and RCCL to pick up...many lines are reporting much higher than average bookings for 2021 and 2022, and that's above people using their future cruise credits. (Which is probably why there are not that many bargains out there.) Never been an NCL fan myself. The market may contract a bit but there many dedicated cruisers who are just waiting until they think it is safe again. Granted, it the cruising population may be smaller than before but remember, cruising had been growing at over 10% a year recently.

Just because travel demand -- including for cruises -- is low, does not mean that dropping fares will bring back the business.

Given the awful role played by cruise lines in spreading Covid-19 and then dealing with onboard issues, many travel analysts believe that it will take years before business recovers and that cheap prices won't generate demand.

As others note, keeping prices high also helps to get rid of those credits which are a liability on the books.

Provably false. Cruise bookings for 2021 are above 2019 levels. No need for the cruise lines to lower prices.

I'm also expecting cruise lines to lower capacity, so that's another reason for no price reductions.

You got your Econ 101 all wrong. Others have posted enough reasons why you got it all wrong. Your yelling to the cruiseline while understandable, but it is very laughable, even from a passenger's view point.

Cruise is NOT a business that like selling gadgets - it has its devoted customers, many of them are very eager to return to cruising, plus many of them have large FCC to use due to the gigantic number of canceled cruises - we are talking about a full 4 months worth of sailings completely wiped out - over 50% of them are already paid for when canceled... Those are captive customers that would provide a high floor of the prices.

On top of that, gone would be the day that a ship will sail in full capacity, (hence those bargains showed up after final payment deadline). Hence the operation cost would be higher.

Time will tell when we get into 2021 / 2022 but right now many cruises in the first 9 months of 2021 are seeing a lot of bookings. Whether these early bookings with fully refundable deposits will turn into final bookings, we wont know until months later. However for the time being when the cruiselines see such demand, that is exactly what they "listen up" - the waves of bookings are crashing up their ships... why would they lower the fares?

Pre-virus, from casino promos I've gotten cruise offers at least once a month. I wonder how much of the increase in bookings for 2021 are "real = passenger" bookings vs casinos (and other entities) posturing for space for their promos?

At this point the percentage of avid, habitual cruise passengers willing to risk COVID exposure by sailing is probably trivial. The rest of the addressable market currently equates cruising with getting sick and maybe dying, and no amount of discounting will get them packing bags.

It does not help the cruise lines that investigative reporting is starting to emerge on their shameful decisions and actions in February and March -- lying to passengers, health ministers, the CDC, etc. -- which makes them extremely difficult to trust now if they claim they're doing extra sanitizing, etc. The business appears to have gotten hundred of people killed during high transmission periods, including many of its own customers and crew.

Remember that the industry was already overprovisioned relative to demand before all this broke out -- too many ships and cabins chasing too few customers -- and if half a dozen major brands are destroyed by coronavirus it would give the remainder a fighting chance in the very long run.

That doesn't fit with the 100% load factor on virtually every ship worldwide. I haven't seen or even heard of a ship go out with empty cabins in the past 15 years.

There's no way to know who's right, but I strongly disagree. I think there are plenty of people who would go back to normal life (including cruising) immediately if given the choice. Fear of coronavirus isn't going to keep these people from living their lives.

You are correct that cruise ships rarely have more than a few empty cabins, but not always. Here is one counterexample from my cruises:

Summer 2010, Azamara Quest (former R-ship) 12-day cruise Istanbul-<Black Sea ports>-Ephesus-Athens(Piraeus). 395 passengers, slightly over 400 crew. That ship's capacity was around 700 IIRC.

I have also been on a couple mass market cruises where the top prize on first day of bingo was to move into the top suite onboard, so those cruises may have been close to 100% full but clearly weren't absolutely at 100%...

....Except that cruisers (statistically) tend to be middle-aged or older, and that brings medical vulnerability into the picture.