Fears that the grounding of Costa Concordia in Italy on 13 January might derail appear not to have materialised as ticket prices seem to be firming. “As we are now moving into the heart of Wave Season, and as we are now one full week past the Concordia incident, we thought it timely to check on cruise pricing for the past week,” UBS cruise industry analyst Robin Farley said.
“Although we expected that a strong start to Wave Season would likely be derailed by the accident in Italy last week, ticket prices increased ~40bp in price sequentially week-over-week, and could be up as much as ~1% since the start of the year, according to our UBS Cruise Data Tracker. What is even more surprising is that average ticket prices increased since the start of the year for almost every brand that we survey, including Costa.”
“While still early, impact so far on bookings may not be as negative as one might have expected. Our EPS adjustments last week assume 50bp impact on total demand, with ~10% impact to Costa specifically, which nets to 200bp impact to CCL Carnival Corp & plc) and 50 bp impact to RCL (Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd)."
“Our pricing checks indicate that for the 2012 cruising season, cruise prices across the Caribbean have been up moderately in the last few weeks, including another slight uptick so far in Wave. Caribbean has shown strength since the second to last week of December. Alaska is moderately up since start of year, including an uptick in the last week. Finally, our checks indicate that Med cruise pricing has been stable since the downward pricing adjustment in early November,” she said in a report.
