Andrea Zelinski
Carnival Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean International this month celebrated record-breaking booking weeks. We're not talking about the best bookings they'd seen all year, but their highest-volume bookings ever.
What they didn't say while running their victory lap was the role future cruise credits (FCCs) played helping them shatter those records.
It all happened around March 31, the end of Q1. In the one-week period from March 28 to April 3, 50-year-old Carnival crushed its all-time busiest booking week by a double-digit percentage. Fifty-three-year-old Royal Caribbean International reported its largest single booking day and highest-volume booking week from March 26 to April 1.
While agents say the industry is now experiencing its Wave season, Truist stock analyst Patrick Scholes notes that the spike in bookings at Carnival wasn't random, but due to a big end-of-month deadline encouraging people with FCCs to cash them in -- and fast.
Carnival, indeed, had a deadline approaching. It was offering customers between $300 and $600 in "Enhanced Value" onboard credit if they redeemed their FCC by March 31.
Royal Caribbean International declined to comment on what percentage of the week's bookings came from the redemption of FCCs and how many of its FCCs expired in March.
None of the major contemporary cruise lines wanted to talk about FCC expirations. Emails to Norwegian Cruise Line asking about how many FCCs expired in March went unanswered. Carnival and Royal Caribbean also dodged that question.
I asked MEI Travel's Beci Mahnken, owner of MEI-Travel, what role the redemption of FCCs played in her travel agency at that time.
"The pent-up demand is finally springing loose in a big way, which is truly welcome after the past two years," she said.
She didn't see a rush of FCCs redeemed in March. Those cruise credits her firm did redeem, she said, were largely applied to final payments, not new bookings. Roughly 25% to 30% of new cruise bookings were utilizing FCCs in some way.
While March is within the traditional Wave season every year, she attributes the record bookings to a perfect storm: families deciding how to spend their vacation time this year, a relaxing of pandemic protocols and having FCCs ready to redeem. That, she said, and an overall sense that life with Covid is part of a new "normal."