in this cruise update I pick apart what's happening as
Cunard cancels all existing cruises on Queen Elizabeth until the end of 2021.
yes the end of 2021! And they put back the launch of their
fleet until May 2021. At the same time Princess Cruises have
also announced some of their fleet will not be returning
until way into 2021. What's going on? What does it all mean?
i'm Gary Bembridge, this is another of my cruise
updates. It's increasingly looking like cruises and cruise lines that were
planning. or hoping. to call on multiple countries as part of
their itinerary are increasingly cancelling cruises into
2021. Before we take a look at Cunard and
Princess most recent announcements ,let's take a look at where we were
already. We'd already seen a large number of cruise lines cancelling cruising
until the middle of December, and that includes P&O Cruises out of the UK,
Seabourn, Holland America and Princess Cruises. We've also seen Crystal Cruises
and Viking Cruises cancelling right through to the 31st of December.
Cunard have announced that they are cancelling their world cruises, as i had
predicted in my last cruise update, but they're not
bringing their ships back until March, April or May. Queen Elizabeth
will return to service on March the 25th, Queen Mary 2 on April the 18th and Queen
Victoria on May the 16th, but importantly Queen Elizabeth was due
to sail for the rest of the year around Australia,
Japan and Alaska. They have cancelled that completely,
and replaced them with cruises out of Southampton. Initially
which are going to be between 3 and 14 days long, they're starting off with
cruises around the UK and Irish coast, they then have some
overnight trips to Amsterdam, then start to go a little bit further
afield into Northern Europe and eventually
towards the end of the season run some trips in the Mediterranean out of
Barcelona. So what we're seeing is cruises that
relied on calling on multiple countries have been pushed way way back to late in
2021. Within hours Princess Cruises announced
a similar thing they also cancelled their two
world voyages. The first of those was the Island Princess,
that was a world cruise sailing from North America and they have
cancelled all segments related to that and all of the
cruises in the run-up to the start of that world cruise.
The other one is Pacific Princess, and that was due to do a
South America circumnavigation sailing from Australia,
and again they have cancelled all the cruises in the run-up to that as well.
Both Cunard and Princess are offering a either a full refund
or you can get 125 percent future cruise credit.
It's becoming really really obvious, I believe, that cruises that are calling
on multiple countries are just finding it impossible to sail,
and cruise lines are having to cancel those.
So as you think about returning to cruising, one thing you may really want
to focus on is cruises which call on very few countries. Only cruise
around your home country. We've seen that happen really much in
Europe, so we've seen in Norway for example where Hurtigruten
and SeaDream sail around Norway, we've seen cruises to nowhere
sailing out of Germany for German, Austrian and Swiss citizens,
out of Italy we've seen MSC start up sailing
originally to other countries, but they're struggling a little bit with
that now having to postpone the second ship
coming to service because they're not getting the demand as people are
concerned about the different testing and
potential quarantine as they call on different countries.
In French Polynesia you've got Paul Gauguin and Arunui
starting up because again that falls under one territory.
I think the most recent Cunard and Princess news really confirms
what i think is kind of obvious as we see world cruises
disappearing, but i think we're increasingly seeing as Cunard has shown
that cruises covering lots of territory,
traveling around the world because of the difficulty of airlines
and connecting flights for cruisers, the chopping and changing
nature of the virus in different countries, and the travel advice
and just the whole unpredictability of that, and also the challenge of actually
then getting people out into ports, and again (very importantly) no protocol
has been agreed around the world for the return to cruises. As we know
in Europe they're testing out some protocols with testing and so on and so
forth. Hopefully you found this update helpful,
interesting and I have loads more cruise updates, so why don't you
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updates?