Have you figured out what you’re going to be doing in a year’s time, or in 18 months for that matter?
Well, it appears that hundreds are planning to go cruising as bookings are rolling in for new ships that haven’t even been built yet, let alone entered service.
You could have been excused for thinking this was all an elaborate April Fool’s Day prank.
But I am assured by the cruise lines concerned that the figures I have been given are correct.
In the past week there has been impressive interest in two new ships – P&O Cruises’ Azura and Cunard Line’s Queen Elizabeth – which don’t even enter service until April and October 2010 respectively.
These will be followed on Easter Monday when sales open for Allure of the Seas, the second of Royal Caribbean International’s 5,400-passenger mega cruise ships, which doesn’t enter service until, wait for it, December next year.
Then there is Norwegian Cruise Line’s largest ship, the 4,200-passenger Norwegian Epic, which is due to enter service in May 2010, running Caribbean cruises from Miami.
I never cease to be amazed by the interest in new ships and the fact that bookings pour in within minutes of booking channels opening.
It took a record 29 minutes and 14 seconds precisely for the maiden voyage of Queen Elizabeth, from Southampton to the Atlantic Islands, to sell out.
More than half of the remaining maiden season, made up of six sailings between October and December 2010, was sold within 1½ hours.
And more than 15 per cent of the total capacity of Azura’s first season was snapped up on the first day of the ship’s cruises being made available through agencies such as Virgin Holidays Cruises.
Yet this is despite the ships still being in the early stages of construction in their respective shipyards and the UK being in the depths of economic recession.
That means that prospective passengers are committing their money a year or more in advance on the basis of what they have seen and read about the new ships – some would say a pretty risky gamble.
But there’s a huge following due to the interest generated when a new ship is announced and certain passengers are always keen to be amongst the first on board to experience the next big thing in cruising.
Maiden voyages are always special as each cruise line pulls out all the promotional stops to try and gain a competitive advantage over their rivals.
However, first sailings are not without teething troubles as staff get to grips with the new hardware, which will only have seen ‘action’ for may be a couple of dry-run sailings with shore-based employees and their families on board.
There have been a couple of maiden voyages that did not quite live up to expectations, most notably P&O Cruises’ Aurora which had to return to port after breaking down in the Bay of Biscay.
Such incidents are, fortunately, the exception to the rule and the one-upmanship appeal of taking a maiden voyage appears to be as compelling as ever.
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