| Dreams of an Aus season?

HAVING overnight announced its plans to restart operations for its Crystal Cruises brand in the Bahamas in Jul, Genting Hong Kong is eyeing the Australia/NZ region as one of its next markets for a return for Dream Cruises.

Vice President Sales & Marketing Australia & New Zealand Brigita Devries told Cruise Weekly Dream was currently discussing the potential of further travel bubbles with the Government of Singapore.

“They’re quite pro- the idea, it’ll all come down to the government here” she explained.

“We’ve got a plan A, B, C, D in place if that happens, in terms of itineraries, and how we’d penetrate the market if that happens.”

Beginning Jul, Crystal will begin cruising from Nassau and Bimini, with Devries saying the cruise line was also in talks with a range of other countries, such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

“There’ll hopefully be one or two destinations on the cards for Asia this year, but it all depends on international borders opening and vaccine rollout,” she added.

“We’re now in the final stages of planning itineraries and how they’ll be facilitated…there might be some domestic deployments for certain countries, even with Star Cruises, like we’re doing in Taiwan and Singapore.”

With Genting initiating more returns to service for its range of brands, and releasing more product to book, Devries said the company had seen a shift in booking demographic, toward the 30 age group.

She said 2022 and 2023, especially for Crystal, was looking quite healthy, with a lot of interest for the cruise line’s recently released world cruise, especially since the announcement all passengers must be vaccinated (CW 19 Feb).

“[Crystal] want to send a message to consumers it is safe,” she said.

“We want to send that message of reassurance they will be comfortable, whatever we do with shore excursions, whatever we do on board, no-one will be implicated.

“We’ve had people who have called us that have never cruised before but are so impressed we’ve put this mandate out that they’ll book with us and people are ready to book now with us because of it.”

Devries also noted “fantastic progress” had been made in Crystal’s efforts to return refunds to travel advisors, noting, “there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel”.

“It’s been a very hard road for the agents, their clients, even for our own staff,” she said.

” The team are working extremely hard with Crystal in Miami…it was certainly challenging”.