This page seems a little on the slow side

[Davechipp74]

Do you suppose it's because Virgin is geared toward a more "younger hip crowd" who may not be aware of Cruise Critic, and it's more traditional form of old style cruising? I personally have not cruised Virgin yet but it will be my next cruise, Iv'e been a member of this board for a while and count myself an experienced cruiser, I like the way Virgin seems to be shaking up the industry and feel we can use "new blood" so to speak. 

 

[Fogcityca13]

Even on Reddit VV isn’t mentioned much in r/cruise. My guess is the line is still very new. I’ve been excited to try the line and wish we could sail earlier, but already had a RCL trip booked in May. The private Facebook groups seem to be kind of active. I don’t really stay on Facebook for very long. 

[Cherries Jubilee]

I think there are several reasons we aren’t hearing more.

 

1. Their target audience might be more of an Instagram picture crowd than a review writing crowd. Younger people like to show everyone what they’re doing way more than they like to talk about it for some reason.I wish they enjoyed doing both.

 

2. Money is tight for a lot of people right now. Virgin is kind of a splurge. They might have overestimated how easy it would be to convince people (especially their non-cruising target audience) to spend that much on a cruise.

 

3. The world is still recovering from COVID and cruising got a bad rep so fewer people have jumped back on board already.

 

4. They need to up the ante on entertainment. They might have different entertainment but it doesn’t really sound like they have enough of it.
 

5.  They need to fix their customer service. I don’t care how much people loved the food if the customer service and the app suck. People don’t usually knowingly walk into a tough and expensive situation.

 

6. That tiny pool has turned off some people who weren’t even going to use it.

 

Things will probably pick up dramatically when people are no longer afraid to cruise and the prices drop some.

[johnnylikely]

I think it's a numbers game- a few ships, limited capacity etc I guess when her fleet grows and has more passengers/rep then we'll see more

[ociana]

One thing to consider is that the majority of folks on CC were cruising pre-pandemic and this line debuted during the pandemic.  Cruisers with loyalty perks or reservations already saved up burning a hole in their pocket are going to default to the lines they have those perks with first as they start traveling again, before they try out a new line.  

 

Personally, we had decided we were just about done with cruising after our last one in 2019...before giving it one more try with Virgin - so glad we did!  It provides what other lines have failed at, and got rid of all the reasons we wanted to quit.  

 

My guess is that traffic will pick up as the line expands to more than one ship, cruisers start being willing to give it a try and new cruisers attracted by the cruise line start finding this community (you can't live on insta forever...)

[CruisingWalter]

When you launched during the pandemic, only had one ship sailing until this week, you're not going to get a lot of chatter. Plus as others have mentioned, Cruise Critic is not all that well known to new cruisers and VV's target market. So many get their information from YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. When I mention CC on my TikTok episodes, I usually get a few comments on each one, "I didn't know CC existed, thanks!" 

 

The Disney forum is relatively quiet too because most of those cruisers prefer Facebook groups over CC. Different strokes for different folks. 

 

I would have thought after TripAdvisor purchased CC we would have seen a much larger travel/media/social presence but it still seems like this site is very much word-of-mouth. It also seems like CC's presence on all the other lines is somewhat diminished these days. When we first started sailing the Cruise Critic meetup on the 1st sea day was always a big deal, but these days they seem much quieter with smaller groups.