NEW YORK — To feed its global ambitions, Royal Caribbean International will attempt to replicate its North American agent networks as it expands into sundry foreign markets.
“We believe that the relationship we have with Canadian and U.S. agents is the gold standard,” Royal Caribbean President and CEO Adam Goldstein said during an interview here.
As an example, he pointed to China, where Royal Caribbean now has two ships sailing. Including third and fourth berths, those two ships have the same capacity that the cruise line’s entire fleet of five ships had when Goldstein joined the line in 1988.
That kind of expansion means Royal Caribbean has to find between 7,000 and 10,000 passengers a week to fill those cabins. And one way it is planning on doing that is by working to replicate the sales network it has in the U.S. and Canada.
Goldstein said he believes that a distribution system that has worked well in North America can be successfully transplanted to other parts of the globe. But the cruise line cannot spend decades building its foreign networks.
“What we have built here in the last 42 years is what we need to build in China, but on an accelerated basis,” he said.
Moreover, the network has to be built not only in the big coastal cities but inland, as well. Royal Caribbean already has staff in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing and additional staff in Singapore.
Royal Caribbean has been sailing in China since 2008, and Goldstein said it is seeing “extremely high” satisfaction ratios from its Chinese clients.
Both ships’ itineraries are aimed directly at the Chinese market; about 50% to 60% of the front-of-house staff speaks Mandarin. Now, the challenge is building marketing and distribution so that Royal Caribbean can sell to China’s growing affluent population, much of which is concentrated in cities.
In the short term, Goldstein said, the cruise line doesn’t plan to add any more ships in China. Rather, it is focused on establishing the “prestige” of the brand in the market.
For that reason it has positioned two Voyager-class ships in China. The Voyager of the Seas just arrived there, and the Mariner of the Seas will replace the Legend of the Seas next year.
The ships are undergoing or about to undergo upgrades, part of a fleetwide project costing hundreds of millions of dollars. The line sees value in the upgrades because of an unusually long gap between new ship launches. Its last new ship, the Allure of the Seas, was launched in 2010. The next, the first of its Sunshine ships, will launch late in 2014.
Both the Mariner and the Voyager are being outfitted with the digital signage that is so popular on the Oasis of the Seas. It is used to inform passengers about what’s happening on the ships, how to get to points of interest and how busy specialty restaurants are.
Both ships also are being equipped with improved WiFi coverage, an outdoor movie screen, new specialty restaurants and other improvements.
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