The cruise industry is increasing and evolving. How is coverage cowl for cruise passengers adapting to healthy a changing cruise passenger demographics? How can travel insurers and cruise lines collaborate extra care to ensure their customers are accurately protected? Robin Gauldie investigates.
In keeping with Nigel Lingard, cruising is a cruise and journey enterprise management representative within the UK, a rather small industry with a long way to head’. The cruise quarter represents the handiest percent of the overall international journey industry, consistent with the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), the world’s biggest cruise enterprise exchange enterprise, based totally within the US, yet it suggests decent year-on-yr growth.
Cruise lines carried 28. Five million passengers in 2017-18, consistent with the CLIA, displaying a boom of seven consistent with cent. Around half of those (14.2 million) got here from America. Passenger numbers grew with the aid of nine according to cent in 2018, making it the fastest developing and using some distance the largest cruise marketplace in the global.
Led with China’s aid, growth in the Asian market for cruising slowed barely in this era, however, nevertheless accelerated utilizing 5 in line with cent to a total of four.2 million passengers. The CLIA Cruise Review enterprise file additionally showed that the UK and Ireland cruise industry hit a document 2,009,000 passengers in 2018, surpassing the two million mark a yr in advance than expected and up to two in line with cent from 2017. The typical European marketplace for ocean cruising grew by way of three.3 consistent with cent towards 2017, to 7.17 million, following a -keeping with-cent boom the previous 12 months.
The worldwide cruise enterprise has greater than a hundred ships on order for delivery in the next few years. Some are ocean-going giants capable of wearing 6,000 passengers. Others are ‘day trip vessels’ carrying fewer than 1,000 searching for ‘undiscovered’ locations. “That fashion is bound to preserve because it’s far no longer viable to construct a smaller ship that isn’t always a top rate product,” says Lingard.
Just quite a number
There’s a perception – cautiously fostered by way of the world’s cruise strains – that cruising is no longer the preserve of aging clients of fairly wealthy retirees. They factor to figures that suggest that cruise passengers are, on average, extensively more youthful and greater adventurous than inside the beyond. Technology in the past, on-board sports might encompass nothing tons greater active than a recreation of deck quoits. Even a mid-marketplace, mainstream cruise providing may tempt visitors with stories and activities starting from scuba diving to sea kayaking to jet snowboarding.
“The cruise industry could be very targeted on growing appealing propositions which might be geared toward a more youthful and more active target audience,” says Kate Huet, Managing Director of UK insurer International Travel and Healthcare Limited. “They are packaging cruising in this type of way as to project the all-inclusive land-based vacation. Shorter five-day, seven-day, and 10-day itineraries also are aimed at a more youthful, operating target audience.”
CLIA spokesperson Charlotte Humphrey concurs: “Recent developments show that cruise visitors are in search of greater energetic stories, and cruise traces are accommodating to this trend.”
However, within the UK, the cruise enterprise has didn’t make sizable inroads into younger markets, claims Nigel Lingard. “There are too many wheelchairs on cruise ships for more youthful humans to want to sign up for in,” he stated at the recent ITIC UK convention.
“The UK cruise marketplace continues to be very a lot the area of the more mature traveler,” concurs Huet. According to the CLIA, the average age of a cruise passenger has now fallen to 46 years – but the common UK cruise passenger improved slightly, according to the business enterprise’s modern figures, from 53.5 to 55.2 years. Over the same length, the over-65 phase became even greater dominant, accounting for forty-two in step with cent of cruise passengers in 2015 compared to 33 according to cent in 2005, while the market share of all under-sixty five age groups stagnated or declined.
