When the new Carnival Horizon enters service next spring, she will be doing a relatively short season in the Mediterranean, Fred Stein, senior director of revenue planning and fleet development, told Cruise Industry News. She will sail four roundtrip cruises from Barcelona before sailing trans-Atlantic to New York, becoming Carnival’s seasonal ship in New York for the summer of 2018.
That in turn means that the Sunshine, which has been alternating seasonally between Port Canaveral and New York, will remain in Port Canaveral, according to Stein.
After summering in New York, the Horizon moves to Miami, where she will basically take over the Vista’s program of six- and eight-day cruises.
“The Vista moves to Galveston, which continues to be a successful market for us,” Stein continued. “That means a ship needs to depart Galveston, and that will be the Breeze, and she will go to Port Canaveral, taking on what the Magic is doing, and the Magic will make the trek down to Miami. Those are basically the changes brought on by the introduction of the Horizon.”
The other big change, Stein said, is that the Splendor is leaving Miami for the West Coast in January 2018, homeporting in Long Beach, where she will replace the Miracle, which is moving to Tampa.
Sailing from more North American homeports than any other brand, Carnival is building up capacity in several ports.
Carnival will continue to have three ships year-round in Galveston, with the Vista being slightly larger than the Breeze, thus representing a slight capacity increase, Stein said.
Port Canaveral will have three ships year-round, seeing a small capacity increase as well in 2018.
Tampa will also see an increase. “With the Miracle in Tampa, we will have two ships, returning to the capacity we had there several years ago,” Stein noted. The Paradise will sail four- and five-day cruises from Tampa, calling overnight in Havana on select sailings starting in June.
New Orleans will continue to have two ships year-round, the Triumph and the Dream.
Other year-round ports include Ft. Lauderdale with the Conquest, Baltimore with the Pride, Charleston with the Ecstasy, Jacksonville with the Elation and Mobile with the Fantasy.
In addition, the Fascination will sail seven-day cruises from San Juan on what Stein called a split program with some cabins filled in Barbados with passengers from the local market and from the U.K.
The Legend returns to Seattle for the Alaska season; her repositioning voyages to and from Honolulu sail via Vancouver. The Spirit stays in Australia.
Stein said that while new ships are the primary catalyst for moving existing ships, deployment changes may also be driven by refreshing the content from a particular port.
Carnival is set to introduce a sister ship to the Vista and Horizon in the latter part of 2019 and then two new LNG-fueled Excel-class ships in 2020 and 2022.
“We are working on our long-term plans now, where we are going to homeport the (new ships) and obviously the availability of LNG will factor into our homeport decision,” Stein noted.
Excerpt from Cruise Industry News Quarterly Magazine: Spring 2017
