After the initial shock from the wreck of the Costa Concordia began to subside, many agents came to an uneasy conclusion: Repeat cruise clients would mostly be unfazed by the event, but a potentially large number of first-time cruisers are now more likely to turn away from a vacation-at-sea option.
If that prediction proves to be true, it would represent a significant setback for the cruise lines as well as frontline sellers, both of which have been investing heavily in marketing to first-time cruisers.
“I feel there’s a lot of damage, at least short-term, to the first-time cruiser market,” said Helen Coiro, owner of New York-based Direct Line Cruises. “Frankly, after this, if I hadn’t cruised numerous times, it might scare the pants off of me. But I don’t think that’s the case with the savvy cruiser.”
Others agreed, and many speculated that the grim and disturbing images, coupled with the rising death toll in the days since the Concordia collided with a rocky reef off the Italian island of Giglio on Jan. 13, would send potential first-timers scrambling to book a land vacation instead.
Steve Gelfuso, president and CEO of Cranston, R.I.-based Cruise Brothers, which has 1,500 affiliated home-based agents, said he believes that anyone who has been “sitting on the fence” and thinking about taking a first cruise has been turned off by the idea.
“I think that the people who wanted to have an excuse not to go — like if the wife’s been asking for a cruise, and he didn’t really want to go — this will be their reason,” said Gelfuso, whose agency had several clients booked on future Concordia cruises.
Mark Comfort, who owns Cruise Holidays Kansas City, said it’s impossible to quantify the potential loss of new customers.
“What you don’t know is how many people won’t call now if they were thinking about a cruise,” he said.
Comfort said he’s been checking with his staff every day on cruise booking levels across the spectrum of brands.
“It’s been fascinating to me that while this has been horribly tragic, it has not seemed to create any scare in the minds of [cruisers] who are already booked,” Comfort said. “They are not changing their minds.”
Michelle Fee, president of Cruise Planners/American Express, said the question for future clients is: “Are you a cruiser?”
“For us in the industry, we’ve all been on so many cruises that I don’t think this one incident is going to determine whether we’re going again,” Fee said. “But if you’ve never cruised you might say, ‘See, that’s why I won’t go.’”
The wider view
While cruise booking cancellations have been few so far, agents nonetheless are puzzling over the wider ramifications of the chaotic scenes that followed the Concordia accident.
“This isn’t only a Costa situation,” Fee said. “It spills over into the cruise industry. And while the phones are still ringing, we won’t be able to gauge it until we get through it. We have to see how it plays out, I’m thinking into late February.”
Fee said that while many U.S. customers perceive Italy-based Costa Cruises as a foreign line, “it’s still getting linked to Carnival, and we sell a lot of Carnival.” Costa is a wholly owned subsidiary of Carnival Corp.
In a news conference Jan. 16 from company headquarters in Genoa, Costa Chairman and CEO Pier Luigi Foschi said he believed that the line’s loyal passengers and its track record of safety and quality service during the last 60 years would help ensure the survival of the company.
Costa became a Carnival Corp. brand in 1997, after Carnival and Airtours, the U.K. company in which Carnival held a 25% stake, signed agreements to buy controlling shares of Costa Cruises from the Italian family that owned it.
Costa’s overseas roots are probably one of the reasons American cruise customers haven’t been canceling trips, said Dwain Wall, senior vice president and general manager of CruiseOne and Cruises Inc.
Wall said he’d been surprised at what little effect the Costa accident had been having on bookings, considering it is one of the worst commercial maritime disasters in a century.
“Probably what’s going on in some form is that Costa has very little product from U.S. ports,” Wall said. “So from that perspective, it has a low profile here, and that’s helping to minimize the impact.”
He said that CruiseOne and Cruises Inc. had seen no cancellations as a result of the Concordia accident. After running a sales report to measure bookings in the first three days after the accident against the same time frame last year, he said, “Sales actually are up year over year.”
He added that Wave season, which began early this month, has been strong.
“We had a couple people booked on future Concordia cruises, and they called and asked us what would be done for them,” Wall said. “We’re working with Costa to reaccommodate them; even they haven’t canceled.”
Talking points
Wall, who oversees both the CruiseOne franchise network and the Cruises Inc. retailer network, said that upon learning of the accident, his headquarters staff immediately went into “full-force mode” offering guidance to agents about how to discuss the incident with clients.
“We jumped into high gear, issuing communications to the network, offering talking points about the safety record of the cruise industry and doing public relations,” Wall said.
Similarly, Fee said of Cruise Planners, “We monitored [our agents’] chat boards and came out with all kinds of statements, and a Q&A: ‘If your customer is calling you, here’s how to handle it,’ for example.”
Fee said the goal was to keep customers from panicking.
“We lived through 9/11, and I think you learn through things like this,” she said. “You don’t cancel a vacation you’ve booked for the summer because of [the Concordia]. … Try to get people to wait until the dust settles.”
References to 9/11 and to the sinking of the Titanic have been common since the Concordia grounded, a fact that Direct Line Cruises’ Coiro found frustrating.
“The media turned it into a circus,” she said. “Yes, this is a terrible, horrible thing, but it isn’t like the Titanic, and it isn’t like 9/11. …
“I feel terrible about any loss of life, but there was tremendous loss of life on the Titanic 100 years ago. People didn’t have cell phones. There wasn’t land in sight that you could swim to. [The Concordia] was able to communicate. So, although some Concordia passengers and the media would like you to believe that this is just like the Titanic, it is not.”
Coiro added that it was important for agents to drive home the safety record of cruising.
At Cruise Holidays Kansas City, Comfort suggested there might be a silver lining in the Concordia accident: “The one good thing that comes out of any accident is that everyone works to make cruise ships safer and to find more failsafe ways to make sure this won’t happen again.”
The accident, Comfort said, would not sink the industry or his agency.
In fact, a Travel Weekly reporter waited on hold to interview Comfort while he took a client’s credit card information for a new cruise booking to Australia. The sale was worth $12,000.
Follow Donna Tunney on Twitter @dttravelweekly.