According to the talking heads on TV, cruise lines must be scrambling to stop cruisers from cancelling their bookings in the wake of 24-7 news coverage of Costa Concordia.
I certainly have received phone calls from clients who reference Concordia, but not in the way broadcasters seem to believe. I am receiving calls from people wondering if there are any deals due to cancellations.
The answer is a definite no. Let me rephrase that. Cruising is always an exceptional value, and sometimes there are even better deals, but Concordia has had zero impact on pricing or cancellatoins. That's not to say that some residual effect for Costa won't emerge, but experienced cruisers know what an anomoly this was. Cruising has always been and remains one of the safest ways to travel. You're safer taking a cruise than going to the grocery store. The most dangerous part of a cruise is the drive to the port, and that's not exactly a white knuckle affair.
This is not to say that there are not on occasion events that impact demand, but the last one that really impacted demand was September 11, 2001, a date most of us remember pretty well. The week or so following that horrific day, passengers cancelled and cruise lines scrambled to fill ships leaving in the immediate future. I couldn't resist a weekend cruise to Baja that left the weekend following 9/11, although I no longer remember what the price was other than cheap. For Summer of 2002, which wouldn't start for eight months, Celebrity took the precaution of redeploying one of its ships to Alaska, which they felt would elicit less fear for advance booking.
Go back less than eleven years, and you find a completely different world, a world where facebook and smartphones didn't exist, and even computers were much less prevalent. Amazing how fast things change. In those days, printed brochures were how most people learned about cruises, and a ship not in the brochure needed to stimulate demand with low pricing. That week, I locked in group space at what I would call stupidly low pricing, and over the course of the next few months found ready takers. Everyone got a bargain, and we all loved that cruise to Alaska, a remarkable destination to which we will return this summer.
There was another trip Julie and I booked immediately following 9/11/01. It was a self-guided/self-drive/bed-and-breakfast trip to Ireland for February of 2002. Now keep in mind February is a low demand month for Ireland, which gets darn cold at that time of year, and in addition to that, people truly were saying they wouldn't get on a plane if they didn't absolutely need to fly in the days following THE September 11.
We didn't believe the world would come to an end, and it turned out to be a good bet, especially when you consider that if the world does end, then you won't care much about having thrown away money on a trip you would have taken if the world had not ended.
Anyway, we loved Ireland, despite some chilled bones.
As these things seem to happen, two other events brought my thoughts to Ireland. First, my friend Tom, whose last name indicates Irish ancestry, asked about adding hotels in Ireland and London at the end of his Northern Europe cruise scheduled for next summer. Second, a representative from Brendan Vacations happened to be a keynote speaker at a travel conference I attended yesterday, and the photos he showed reminded me of the ones I took on my trip with Julie ten years ago. I also sell self-guided B&B tours, either self-drive or chauffeur driven, or hosted city stays in addition to totally on-your-own hotels or guided tours.
I went back through my blog to find posts I wrote about that trip, and it allowed me to relive those great memories. However, I realized it was pretty hard to dig up all these articles, so I decided to link them here. I hope you enjoy reading these articles about Ireland as much as I did re-reading these posts. If you do, why not take a trip there yourself?
While my name indicates I sell cruises, please remember that I am a full-blown American Express Vacations representative, and I represent virtually every major land tour, hotel and packager in the world. So, when you want a great land trip, contact me.
Here are the links, which include lots of photos as well as great memories:
Dublin
Glendalough
Powerscourt and Kilkenny
Rock of Cashel
Ardmore
Lakes of Killarney
Kerry and the Dingle
Cliffs of Moher
The Burren and Ennis
