Are Royal Caribbean preparing to abandon the UK market

[Lynnwood]

1 hour ago, CruisingJoe09 said:

If that's the case (and it sounds plausible as to why she is currently consigned to short Caribbean cruises), I'm surprised that they didn't swap Indy and one of her sisters to cover the Southampton sailings (e.g. Freedom or Liberty in Southampton and Indy in either Galveston or San Juan). The fact that the whole season and all of those cruises were withdrawn is what felt calculated to me, it just felt like they were grabbing an opportunity to maximise sailings to CocoCay.

This is the very reason giving to my TA when they cancelled our trip. Apologies for getting the destination wrong earlier -it was indeed CocoCay and not Ladabee as I mistakenly remembered.

[njkruzer]

1 hour ago, CruisingJoe09 said:

I think that they replaced Harwich with Amsterdam for the long cruises. Ultimately I think home-porting near the centre of Amsterdam is probably a bigger attraction for the average tourist than a port which is 80 miles out of London.

Yes, we did a TA out of Copenhagen in 2018 that was very nice.  Still missed London.  We're scheduled to do the Anthem TA this November,  if it sails, with 5 days in London. 

[LXA350]

Yields out of Southampton have been the lowest in Europe, maybe one of the reasons RCL decided to deploy only one ship at higher prices and see how it goes to increase it's yields from the UK based market. The UK will remain an important market for RCL, not necesary for cruises out of the UK, but they do represent a significant amount of cruisers sailing on the fleet of RCL globally, hence we will always see ships of X and RCL based out of the UK. If yields will improve we might also see again a 2nd ship based out o Southampton in the future.