Royal Caribbean’s new Perfect Day Island at CoCoCay concept could soon see huge passenger numbers.
The company has already targeted 2 million guests per year through its private island, and now appears to be considering triple-ship calls when appropriate.
“We’ve designed Perfect Day to deliver what we think will generally be a perfect day for our customers. And from what we’ve seen so far with between 4,000 and 6,000 people on the island, we’ve got a huge amount of space available,” said Michael Bayley, president and CEO of Royal Caribbean International, on the company’s first quarter earnings call.
“So we’ve engineered and designed for peak, and the peak was way up close to 10,000. We’ll now operate it with bigger ships coming to Perfect Day, and we’ll see how it goes,” he said. “We’re kind of feeling pretty optimistic about the potential for three ship calls versus two ship calls that could take us up to 12,000 (guests) a day. And remember, it’s a fairly large island and we’ve only developed about a third of it.”
The revamped island houses a massive waterpark and is part of the company’s ongoing strategy to attract the new-to-cruise, which also includes refurbishments on a number of Voyager-class ships before they are placed in the short-cruise market in South Florida.
Bayley said the combination of the ships, which have been through the Royal Amplified refit program, along with Perfect Day, has “really stimulated” the new-to-cruise market.