Big, Bigger and Biggest………………………….

Well the cruise lines are continuing with their ship building programes with more and more mega-ships in the pipeline for many cruise lines, and all this despite the seemingly endless discounting to fill the ships they already have.
“If you build it they will come” said Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, and it seems that the cruise lines are taking the same approach. They seem to believe that they have to keep building bigger and bigger ships with more and more complex facilities in order to attract passengers, but is this the case?
Is this what people want, to be on a ship so huge that you might just as well be in a landbased resort because you have no sense of being at sea at all?

Another issue, I think, with these giants of the seas is that they are too big to dock in port and all the passengers have to queue for tenders.
Why don’t the cruise lines invest their money into refurbishing their existing ships? Surely that would make much better economic sense or am I missing something here?
Royal Caribbean plans to launch another Oasis class ship in 2013, while NCL has plans for two further ships that will each carry 4,200 passengers for 2015. P&O plans the launch of a similar sized ship, while Princess are launching the 3,600 capacity Royal Princess in June this year in Southampton.
It would seem that with the increase in fuel prices over the last 10 – 15 years that the cruise lines need to build bigger ships in order to carry more passengers to spread the cost amongst them. So, that appears to be the reason behind all this ship building madness!
So, how are these ships to be filled? Where are all the passengers going to come from? It appears that the Chinese are yet to fully appreciate the pleasures of cruising but according to one industry insider, once they do “the market will go bonkers”!! Watch this space! We might be opening a branch of cruise.co in Beijing before you know it.