CrystalCruises, the Los Angeles based luxury cruise brand owned by Nippon Yusen Kaisha(NYK) in Tokyo, has lagged markedly behind peers in terms of load factor in the past few months, butefforts are in place to put things right, the parent company said in a statement.
“Othercompanies’ load factors for luxury class vessels are over 90%, but due tomarketing mistakes the load factor for the Crystal Cruises is onlyapproximately 70%,” an unnamed NYK official was quoted as saying in a transcriptof Q&A session of the Tokyo based shipping giant’s first quarter financialyear 2011-12 interim result. The quarter in question started 1 April 2011.
“So there is a lot of room for improvement. Wehave already deployed new personnel to bring about a 180 degree turn in ourmarketing, and are carrying out measures to improve the bottom line. At thecurrent point in time, we expect a profit from the next fiscal year, butultimately we will look at cash flows and make a judgment after consultationwith our accountants,” the official said. NYK published its interims earlier this month.
NYK’scruise operations that include NYK Cruises that operates the 50,200 gross tonAsuka II on the Japanese market in addition to Crystal Cruises, had revenues of7.1 billion yen and they made a loss of 2.3 billion yen in the first quarter ofthe current financial year. By comparison, a year earlier the figures had been 9.0billion and a loss of 1.3 billion respectively. Inthe financial year to 31 March 2011, NYK’s cruise operations made a loss of 2.6billion yen on revenues of 35.8 billion yen.
