Happy New Year, so of course...

[AMHuntFerry]

2 hours ago, judi666 said:

I’ve checked on every sale for my cruise ( it is listed as one on the sales) the price has not changed one cent, in 9 months, except in the lowest inside catagory. How can this be a sale?

Basically, if the price is less than the initial fare (not the "Brochure Fare" which is like MSRP), then it is "on sale".

[pinotlover]

17 minutes ago, AMHuntFerry said:

Basically, if the price is less than the initial fare (not the "Brochure Fare" which is like MSRP), then it is "on sale".

Yep! Anything before that 2 for 1 discount is a Sale! 😂

[Vertygo]

3 hours ago, judi666 said:

I’ve checked on every sale for my cruise ( it is listed as one on the sales) the price has not changed one cent, in 9 months, except in the lowest inside catagory. How can this be a sale?

Depends on which cruise & how many/which cabin classes are included. For example, my 8/2/24 Istanbul to Athens shows French veranda still at $9K, but my A2 upgrade is $6998.

My sister & BIL will upgrade from B4 to PH 2 & still save a few hundred.

[QuestionEverything]

My Jan 12/25 SE Asia cruise is on "sale". Yeh, right.

My booking is $2,200 for 2 higher than when I booked in August. 

The veranda inventory in A, B, C categories are all available. Some of the penthouse inventory is available.

Hummmmmmmmmmm

[pinotlover]

There is a greatly publicized desire to return to cruising. Seems to me, if true, it wouldn’t take a never ending stream of sales to fill the ships. This is especially the case when considering the number of cruise ships that became scrap iron in 20/21. Of all my cruises in the past 18 months, only one has been full. Perhaps the demand isn’t as great as some believe.

 

Oceania added a new ship, the Vista, last May. Is it now just mostly distributing its customer base between more ships? 1200 new cruisers is a lot to add. With the addition of the Allura next year, it’ll take the deletion of two R ships just to break even with needed headcount. That upcoming new cruise release will be an interesting one. With a growing portion of the world redlined, thus fewer places to visit, how many cruises to nowhere can they sell? Brugge with 12 cruise ships tied up in Ostende? It will take a huge sale to get most of us there for that! Alternative plans?

[QuestionEverything]

3 hours ago, pinotlover said:

There is a greatly publicized desire to return to cruising. Seems to me, if true, it wouldn’t take a never ending stream of sales to fill the ships. This is especially the case when considering the number of cruise ships that became scrap iron in 20/21. Of all my cruises in the past 18 months, only one has been full. Perhaps the demand isn’t as great as some believe.

 

Oceania added a new ship, the Vista, last May. Is it now just mostly distributing its customer base between more ships? 1200 new cruisers is a lot to add. With the addition of the Allura next year, it’ll take the deletion of two R ships just to break even with needed headcount. That upcoming new cruise release will be an interesting one. With a growing portion of the world redlined, thus fewer places to visit, how many cruises to nowhere can they sell? Brugge with 12 cruise ships tied up in Ostende? It will take a huge sale to get most of us there for that! Alternative plans?

pinotlover, thank you for your long history of posts on CC. Your knowledge is admired.

I must agree with you regarding your analysis.

I posted earlier about my Jan 2025 SE voyage - I checked availability this am - much inventory not booked yet. A year away is not that long really, that tells me that people are not booking way out and or less demand and or people are booking later hoping for a deal.

I am one of 8 people I know that cruise. At of today, other than my booking, none of the others have booked a cruise, none, and there is no desire to do so.

What they have done is purchase new high end SUV's for land trips (me and others), RV's for land trips and all of us have booked escorted tours in Europe and beyond.

This is a small sample of vacation customers for sure, but the purchasing decisions of myself, my spouse and my friends tells me something about the "appeal" of cruising right now.

My O booking is being evaluated - I am very concerned about missed ports and shortened stays given the huge distance to travel. 

Thanks again for your wisdom and taking the time to post.

 

[osandomir]

We used to book our cruises way out and didn’t wait for the sales. Most of them never went on sale and some were sold out long before the sailing dates. Now more and more we started to look into escorted tours and all types of land vacations for two reasons. Most importantly, we’ve been to the vast majority of the ports the cruise liners are capable of getting to and there are so many interesting places where there’s no much water around. There were never guarantees that any cruise would go as advertised, but now because of the financial and political state the cruises became much more unpredictable than we can tolerate. If more people started thinking the same way it can explain all countless cruise sales which are obviously indicative of not that much of demand.

That being said, we love cruising and have couple of Oceania cruises booked and one of them is the part of this New Year sale. I’ve contacted our TA to find out how we can benefit from this sale.

 

Edited January 3 by osandomir