Tom Stieghorst
Having the money to cruise, and deciding to spend it are two different things, says Mark Conroy, the veteran cruise CEO and newly appointed head of the Americas office for Silversea Cruises.
When it comes to the luxury segment of the market, agents have never had it better, Conroy said.
In a recent interview, Conroy recalled his start in luxury cruising at Royal Viking Line in 1982. He said customers came from what has come to be called “the Greatest Generation.”
“These are people who had gone through the Depression. They were born right after or during World War I. Either they or their family was directly impacted by World War II,” Conroy said.
“When the war ended they worked their asses off and made this country great, and also made themselves wealthy. But because of their life experiences, they were much more reluctant to spend their money.”
In contrast, today’s luxury customer has grown up spending rather than saving.
“The boomers today, and even the generation after them, they really tend to enjoy the finer things in life and are easier to convince, so that the market has expanded to be so much bigger than it was in the day,” Conroy said.
An agent with a luxury clientele I spoke with recently had something similar to say about the decline in the stock market and its effect on business. He said the clients in general already have the money to cruise no matter what happens to their investments (barring some doomsday collapse).
He said what does give some clients pause when the stock market goes down is the amount of money that is required to bring large family groups along with them when they cruise.
The common thread is that there’s no shortage of luxury cruise customers, and only limited restraints on their willingness to spend money on expensive cruise vacations.
“So it used to be we were all fighting over that same small group of people, where today the market’s large enough that I think we’re all doing very, very well,” Conroy said.
“And I think the opportunity for us is [that] the premium and contemporary guys are driving people to take cruises [and] as they cycle through their cruise life, they realize the value of cruising and they start looking for different versions of that cruise experience.”