THE Australian expedition cruise market has performed very well in the last 12 months for Silversea, according to the cruise line’s Senior VP Expeditions and Destinations Conrad Combrink. “We’ve added plenty of additional capacity and new product and we also have a very strong following in Australia,” Combrink said. “At...
THE Australian expedition cruise market has performed very well in the last 12 months for Silversea, according to the cruise line’s Senior VP Expeditions and Destinations Conrad Combrink.
“We’ve added plenty of additional capacity and new product and we also have a very strong following in Australia,” Combrink said.
“At one stage Australia was our second largest market…a couple of years back we dropped down to third but we’re now back to number two so we are very encouraged by that,” he added.
Combrink was in Sydney this week to brief the media on the Silversea’s first ever expedition world cruise launching in 2021.
“The reaction from the market [for the expedition world cruise] has far exceeded our expectations…if you combine our confirmed bookings and options we are over 50% sold,” he said.
“We opened it up but only for those interested in the full world cruise…then towards next year we will open up the segments – but only if there’s spots left.”
The 167-day Uncharted World Tour expedition cruise departs Argentina on 30 Jan 2021 on board the company’s Silver Cloud vessel and visits a mammoth 30 countries and 107 ports.
Combrink also noted that Silversea had been able to pursue a more aggressive expansion strategy since Royal Caribbean acquired a 66.7% equity stake in the business (CW 19 Jun 2018), but not at the expense of the brand’s identity he explains.
“It hasn’t changed our DNA, we still have that family approach… both companies have very similar values, so the synergies between the two made the partnership a perfect fit,” he said.
“We’ve always known that we needed to expand in both expedition and in classic and we had reached the ceiling…with the financial backing of Royal Caribbean International that has made it possible to accelerate our expansion,” he added.
Looking to the future, Combrink said the company had “quite a few announcements coming out in the next few months,” with renderings of its highly anticipated expedition ship Silver Origin also to be released in the next few weeks.
“We signed off on the exterior of the ship last week and it’s absolutely gorgeous…this is the first time in Silversea’s history we have built a purpose-built expedition ship and it has allowed us to do things we’ve never done before and really raise the bar.”
