Roy­al Caribbean cruise line is slash­ing a ma­jor part of the re­gion's sum­mer cruise busi­ness come sum­mer 2012. The com­pa­ny has an­nounced that it's repo­si­tion­ing its ship, Ser­e­nade of the Seas, from the Caribbean to Eu­rope, and the Caribbean Tourism Or­ga­ni­za­tion (CTO) has ex­pressed con­cern about the loss.

Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Hugh Ri­ley said the CTO is aware that repo­si­tion­ing is a nor­mal course of busi­ness with­in the cruise sec­tor, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing the sum­mer months. How­ev­er, mem­bers of CTO's Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil of Min­is­ters at a re­cent meet­ing, in­di­cat­ed the need to dis­cuss the mat­ter of sum­mer cruis­ing with some of the in­dus­try's key play­ers, with a view to de­vel­op­ing strate­gies for im­prov­ing the com­pet­i­tive­ness of the Caribbean for sum­mer cruis­ing.

"We recog­nise that the strong com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage that we have in the Caribbean in the win­ter months changes in the sum­mer," Ri­ley said. But he added that while sea­son­al ad­just­ments in cruise traf­fic to the Caribbean re­gion are not un­com­mon, the sit­u­a­tion now mer­its clos­er at­ten­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the south­ern Caribbean where win­ter cruis­ing con­tin­ues to be strong, but sum­mer traf­fic has be­come the vic­tim of high fu­el costs and ge­og­ra­phy.

The cruise in­dus­try is a sig­nif­i­cant com­po­nent of the re­gion's tourism mix and the Caribbean re­mains a high­ly de­sir­able cruis­ing des­ti­na­tion. In 2010 the re­gion's cruise pas­sen­ger ar­rivals grew by six per cent, con­tin­u­ing the phe­nom­e­nal growth ex­pe­ri­enced over the past four decades with the num­bers climb­ing from just over one mil­lion cruise vis­its in 1970 to over 20 mil­lion last year. CTO lead­ers want this strong con­sumer de­mand for the re­gion in the cruise in­dus­try to be de­vel­oped year round, with more sum­mer busi­ness re­sult­ing.

(www.Caribbean360.com)