PacTravel
P&O's Pacific
Company Reshuffles Liven Up Pacific Cruising Market
The Pacific Princess is coming back to the South Seas. For cruise enthusiasts that’s big news. But don’t bother looking for Capt. Stubing or any of the genial crew of the legendary Love Boat. Properly speaking, this is Pacific Princess Mark II, once Renaissance Cruises’ R3 and a very recent addition to the P&O Princess group’s fleet. It was acquired along with one of its sisters, R4, after Renaissance hit unnavigable financial hazards late last year. That’s another, and a sadder, story.
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Meanwhile, in the sometimes bitterly competitive game for supremacy played by the world’s leading cruise lines, the beneficiaries of these changes are frequently the fare-paying passengers, whose ticket prices go down as corporations offer discounted deals, spend billions on new vessels and upgrade existing fleets. The new Pacific Princess, soon to join P&O’s Pacific flagship, Pacific Sky, in Sydney, is a recent example.
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Despite the frequent claims of its brochures, P&O did not “invent South Pacific cruising.” That distinction belongs to Burns Philp and Co. of Australia and the Union Steamship Co. of New Zealand. Both of them introduced cruising to the Islands as far back as 1884.
Not until 1932 did P&O make its first tentative trip to the Islands. In 1974, P&O consolidated Islands cruising when it acquired the ship Fairstar. Now there is no question that the company has refined South Pacific cruising and now dominates it so completely that there is little chance of any other cruise line getting more than the seasonal look in.
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Land-based tourism in the Pacific Islands comes and goes, ever at the mercy of changes to air schedules, coups, cyclones and an expanding catalogue of other man-made or natural misfortunes. Yet cruising continues to grow and prosper. It is the fastest growing sector of tourism, as notable for its ever more expensive elaborations as for the fierce rivalry among its main players. Because of its nearly all-inclusive nature, it also offers some of the best-value vacations available.
Hedonistic travelers are not the only ones who benefit. There are also economic advantages to the ports-of-call, from the government level down to the grassroots vendor. Income from cruising ranges from docking fees and other administrative charges to the sale of T-shirts and grass skirts—so necessary for those “Island Nights” that are a staple of tropical cruises.
How much goes directly to small entrepreneurs is always difficult to assess, but a recent survey involving this writer showed that average spending per passenger on locally obtained items in Port Vila, to use one example, was A$160. Not much, you say? Consider that there are 1,200 passengers on Pacific Sky, and the ship makes about 30 calls a year to that port.
Port Vila has long been a favorite with cruisers, but a typical P&O Islands itinerary also includes the unspoilt paradises that are so loved by brochure writers. P&O can fairly claim to have pioneered several of these as cruise ports: Champagne Bay, Lamen Bay and Mystery Island in Vanuatu, and Lifou in New Caledonia.
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Essentially, Pacific Princess will be doing the same circuit, since the trend toward shorter cruises means concentrating on Melanesian ports near to Sydney. The difference will be a qualitative one, according to P&O, with the new services billed as “World-Style Cruising from Australia.”
At present, Polynesian ports are served seasonally from New Zealand by Pacific Sky. But Tahitian Princess, the other vessel acquired from Renaissance, “at a very effective capital cost,” according to P&O, is to be home-ported in Papeete, and will offer year-round Polynesian itineraries beginning in 2003. Rarotonga in the Cook Islands is expected to feature as a regular port-of-call, as are the Samoas and the Marquesas. Passengers will fly into Papeete to join the cruises. Marketing strategies dictate that Tahitian Princess will be promoted mainly in North America, Pacific Princess mainly in Australia.
Curiously, after all this time, P&O’s antipodean operation is still relatively little known to Northern Hemisphere cruisers, especially Americans, who dominate the market. With a swing toward “safe destinations” on the part of U.S. travellers and a recent poll in the Wall Street Journal that showed increased interest in Australia, South Pacific cruising could be on an upward curve, a prospect evidently foreseen by P&O. With the new acquisitions and itineraries, P&O has not only declared its confidence in the future of Pacific cruising, it has shown its determination to continue dominating it.
For more information, on P&O operations, click on: www.pocruises.com.au or www.poprincesscruises.com.
