| NCL planning for a full house in ’22

NORWEGIAN Cruise Line (NCL) hopes to have its entire fleet operating by early next year, including the Sydney-homeported Norwegian Spirit (pictured) President & Chief Executive Officer Harry Sommer has told Cruise Weekly.

Buoyed by Australia’s travel bubble with New Zealand, which NCL believes will set a precedent for the restart of tourism in the two countries, Sommer said the cruise line is “making plans accordingly” for Spirit to be sailing Down Under some time early next year.

“The critical message from our side is, we’re not in any race to do this, and we really want to take a staged approach… we realise different parts of the world are in different phases of this” he said.

“My guess is Australia will be one of the latter places to resume…the good news is, when we get this restarted in other parts of the world, it’ll give the Australian Govt confidence.

“How quickly things move after that, it’s anyone’s guess, it’s moving a bit slower than we’d like, but it’s moving.”

NCL’s first ports of call for its restart are the Caribbean and Greece (CW 08 Apr), the former of which incorporates the complexity of international, inter-island travel, which the region was happy to accommodate.

“CLIA has said of 500,000 cruisers, (there have been) less than 40 cases, and that was before vaccines,” Sommer said.

“You take these protocols and you layer mandatory vaccinations for all crew and passengers on top of it, and the Caribbean governments’ questions were how quickly can you come?

“Even with that, we want to be super careful, so we’re not starting tomorrow, we’re starting in early August.”

Vice President & Managing Director APAC Ben Angell added the unhurried pace at which NCL was taking its restart was possible thanks to a long booking curve.

“In this market, and Asia to some degree, we focus on fly-cruise holidays and getting guests to book well in advance to travel,” Angell explained.

“We’re booking good numbers, we’re seeing demand come through strongly on ’22 and ’23.

“It’s not a race for us, but we’re doing a great job on building those base loads.”