| Cruise sales off the chart

IT’S now almost exactly 12 months since the start of Travel Daily’s weekly consumer travel spending report in partnership with News Corp (TD 17 Mar 2020) – and for once, this week’s figures show some rare good news for the cruise sector.

Compiled from credit card spending data, the cruise category, has been described as a “showstopper” by News Corp Head of Travel, Dwayne Birtles – so much so that he had to undertake additional checking to ensure the figures were correct.

“We can report that it is indeed correct, with a week-on-week improvement of 12 points,” he told Cruise Weekly yesterday.

Before popping the champagne he noted that the overall spending on cruise is still down 74% year-on-year – but the jump is significant given that the category has not been above minus 80% since COVID hit.

“We dove a little deeper into the spend behaviours, and it appears this improvement in consumer spend has been on larger transaction amounts for more high-end cruise businesses,” Birtles said.

“With many more cruise and touring businesses announcing their higher end cruise experiences in Australia over the past few weeks, there’s no surprise here that those less affected financially by COVID are spending big on these amazing experiences,” he said.

The full weekly News Corp report, which also covers spending on air, touring, travel agents and accommodation, is featured in today’s issue of Travel Daily.