Royal Caribbean President’s Cruise Proves Loyalty Has Survived The Pandemic

Loyalty is the lifeblood of a successful business. The first couple of days of the Royal Caribbean International 2022 President’s Cruise from Seattle to Alaska was a clear demonstration that loyalty to the world’s largest cruise line is alive and well, despite being sorely tested by the global pandemic.

“It’s been a hell of a journey the past two years,” said Michael Bayley, President and CEO of RCI, to an audience of several hundred in the Royal Theater on Ovation of the Seas. A high proportion of guests on the President’s Cruise are members of the Crown & Anchor Society, the loyalty program for the line’s most committed guests.

“You were the loyal customers who were first to come back and book, and then we cancelled your bookings. Then you booked again and we cancelled those bookings.”

Bayley was transparent about the issues that followed the cancellation of some seven million bookings, describing a reservation system that was well-designed to accept bookings, but had little facility to handle mass cancellations, refunds and future cruise credits.

“We realized we forgot to design that system. So we had to handle all of that through pretty much a manual system. It really was a painful process. We tried our best to make everything painless, but it didn’t work.”

The ‘Common Ground’ gathering of Royal Caribbean executives taking questions from the audience is familiar to travel advisors and media on inaugural and other milestone cruises.

Holding it for an audience of frequent cruisers – some of whom have been on over 150 Royal Caribbean sailings, generated questions as tough as any asked by journalists, but without the negativity towards the industry that is rampant in consumer media. Bayley and other key members of the executive team answered them all, extending the gathering far past its scheduled time.

Early in the discussion, Bayley was asked how the pandemic has changed the cruise industry.

“if we had 16 hours we could get through a lot of it,” said Bayley wryly. “It changed people. It changed employees. There’s a huge amount of shift and change everywhere. There’s a different mindset of employees and the communities we visit. Everything is not the same as it was.”

Bayley says the company learned a lot about the importance of relationships during the pandemic: relationships with governments, with medical authorities, with travel advisors, with guests and with destinations. The company was bleeding money – spending upwards of $300 million per month just to keep the fleet from deteriorating.

Getting crew members back to their homes around the world was a mammoth task for the company, and it received little cooperation and support from governments around the world.

“We had 60,000 crew on ships stuck all over the world. We couldn’t get them home. We couldn’t get any governments to help us. It was tense and strange.”

The CEO who has spent 41 years with Royal Caribbean since his first employment as an assistant purser believes the industry was treated unduly harshly by media and many governments around the world.

“We felt like we couldn’t get a break. Media coverage was relentlessly negative,” Bayley said. “It was like we caused the pandemic.”

He singled out Barbados as a nation that really stepped up to help, enabling tens of thousands of crew members to get home, allowing RCI to bring ships there and charter planes that would fly out at night.

“We learned that our close relationship with Barbados really mattered.”

The turmoil of an unforeseen situation saw the company’s executive team and shoreside staff tie themselves in knots trying to plan for a future recovery that at some points seemed unlikely.

“We were constantly planning scenarios. They were all wrong. I think we got to scenario 39. They were still all wrong,” Bayley said.

Yet somehow, Royal Caribbean weathered the storm. The company worked tirelessly to convince medical authorities that they could deliver a safe environment even as the pandemic continued. It succeeded.

It slowly and cautiously returned to service and has since carried more than 2 million guests with a remarkably low number of COVID infections compared with almost any other setting.

They strongly supported the travel advisor community, offering interest-free loans that helped many stay afloat, even as Royal Caribbean’s own future was uncertain.

Now they’re seeing guests return in droves. And under Bayley’s leadership, the company has earned lasting loyalty from the travel trade, as evidenced when Canadian agents named the company Cruise Line of the Year, Large Ships at the 2022 Reader’s Choice Awards. Agents also voted the company #1 in call centre support and health and safety protocols during COVID.

The Common Ground presentation took place on June 25, the annual Day of the Seafarer, and Royal Caribbean celebrated by bringing well over 100 crew members on stage, where they were given a prolonged standing ovation by guests.

After a mammoth test of resilience – and with headwinds of debt, high fuel costs, supply chain issues and other challenges — Bayley was still able to celebrate “a truly remarkable success story.”