A cruise, meaning a travel on a ship where one visit a number of places is a form of holiday alternative that has grown rapidly the last decade. Royal Caribbean International (RCI) is the largest actor on the Swedish market and is now changing its target market strategy. The company is transitioning its focus from the old traditional more affluent clientele, to target a wider span of customers where the people between 30 and 50 years of age are in focus and have become the main target group. Therefore activities aboard are added to suit these customers specifically. What the authors of this thesis want to find out by using both interviews and questionnaires is whether the general opinion about cruising is coherent with the message that Royal Caribbean International is trying to convey. The authors also want to know if the targeting efforts are optimal when trying to alter people’s mindset and attract a new type of younger customers. According to the performed survey, the brand awareness of RCI was best within the main target group. The most efficient media vehicle in communicating RCI’s brand has been brochures followed by newspapers and word of mouth. Somewhat surprisingly neither TV nor Internet was among top three of the most awareness creating media vehicles. Through these media vehicles RCI tries to convey that younger people are now more in focus. However, people older than 50 are the most positive towards going on a cruise themselves. At the same time the whole population seem to think that cruising is best suited for people older than 50. No matter how old the respondents to the questionnaire were they believed that cruising was better suited for people older than themselves. The population is getting older and the proportion of people over 50 years will increase dramatically compared to younger people within the next decades. Still RCI is focusing on adding activities and market themselves towards a younger group. Family behavior is changing and people tend to start a family later. RCI is therefore targeting families to a greater extent in order to attract the young but at the same time retain the older and proportionally growing customers groups. Cruise prices have decreased and RCI is now more than ever not only targeting more affluent people. It is supposed to be afforded by a wide span. Even so, people tend to think that cruising is better suited for high-income takers. At the same time it is widely associated with luxury, not affordability. Associations to cruising are overall positive but they are not necessarily exactly the ones that RCI is trying to communicate the most. Some perceptions are in line with the message RCI are trying to convey while others are based on the established prejudices that surrounds the cruise line industry and that are hard to erase. Even though people typically see cruising as something positive, they are still according to this study not to any great extent considering going on a cruise.

<p>A cruise, meaning a travel on a ship where one visit a number of places is a form of holiday alternative that has grown rapidly the last decade.</p><p>Royal Caribbean International (RCI) is the largest actor on the Swedish market and is now changing its target market strategy. The company is transitioning its focus from the old traditional more affluent clientele, to target a wider span of customers where the people between 30 and 50 years of age are in focus and have become the main target group. Therefore activities aboard are added to suit these customers specifically.</p><p>What the authors of this thesis want to find out by using both interviews and questionnaires is whether the general opinion about cruising is coherent with the message that Royal Caribbean International is trying to convey. The authors also want to know if the targeting efforts are optimal when trying to alter people’s mindset and attract a new type of younger customers.</p><p>According to the performed survey, the brand awareness of RCI was best within the main target group. The most efficient media vehicle in communicating RCI’s brand has been brochures followed by newspapers and word of mouth. Somewhat surprisingly neither TV nor Internet was among top three of the most awareness creating media vehicles.</p><p>Through these media vehicles RCI tries to convey that younger people are now more in focus. However, people older than 50 are the most positive towards going on a cruise themselves. At the same time the whole population seem to think that cruising is best suited for people older than 50. No matter how old the respondents to the questionnaire were they believed that cruising was better suited for people older than themselves.</p><p>The population is getting older and the proportion of people over 50 years will increase dramatically compared to younger people within the next decades. Still RCI is focusing on adding activities and market themselves towards a younger group. Family behavior is changing and people tend to start a family later. RCI is therefore targeting families to a greater extent in order to attract the young but at the same time retain the older and proportionally growing customers groups.</p><p>Cruise prices have decreased and RCI is now more than ever not only targeting more affluent people. It is supposed to be afforded by a wide span. Even so, people tend to think that cruising is better suited for high-income takers. At the same time it is widely associated with luxury, not affordability.</p><p>Associations to cruising are overall positive but they are not necessarily exactly the ones that RCI is trying to communicate the most. Some perceptions are in line with the message RCI are trying to convey while others are based on the established prejudices that surrounds the cruise line industry and that are hard to erase. Even though people typically see cruising as something positive, they are still according to this study not to any great extent considering going on a cruise.</p>

The purpose of this study was to examine Royal Caribbean's crisis communications response following the return of their cruise ships to Labadee, Haiti, soon after the Januaty 12, 20 I 0 earthquake. A case study method was used to evaluate both sides of the situation and Royal Caribbean's crisis communications response is evaluated against a target standard of five benchmarks. The first benchmark requires recognizing that a crisis has occurred. The second benchmark involved having an immediate response, by getting the story out first, even if all the facts are not yet available. The third benchmark conveyed the importance of directly communicating with key stakeholders. The fourth benchmark, an all-time favorite, reiterates the importance of telling the truth, bad and good, and keeping it consistent. The fifth benchmark focuses on companies putting people first and conveying a genuine concern for those affected. This study begins with an introduction of concerned parties, locations and issues. The crisis situation presented is the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that occurred on January 12, 2010 in Haiti. It continues with a discussion of the communication crisis that resulted from Royal Caribbean's decision to continue cruise trips to its port of Labadee on Haiti, following the disastrous earthquake's widespread devastation. Praise and criticism for Royal Caribbean was equally considered, as was the cruise line's crisis management, specifically its series of crisis communications and their short and long-term implications. In conclusion, analysis suggested that Royal Caribbean underutilized crisis communication techniques. It is essential that a company have a swift response and communicate to the public what is being done to make sure that a crisis is handled effectively.

Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian—the most profitable cruise lines today—emerged between the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the elitist leisure ocean travel industry attempted to recover from economic downturn. These mass-market lines targeted an American middle class that increasingly had the desire and financial means to travel. They secured much of this untapped market by creating packaged vacations that responded to the needs and tastes of a middle-class clientele. Drawing on cruise advertisements, newspaper articles, ephemera, industry documents, travel writing, and memorabilia books, this dissertation analyzes how these three companies used cultural and geographic referents to produce cruise vacations, responding to an increased consumer interest in cultural sampling as an accruement of economic globalization. Findings suggest that cruise ships offered their owners a space to arrange simulated interactions with global cultures—a practice that soon extended to Caribbean cruise ports as these companies gained the market power to influence encounters there. This complex collision of global cultures was advanced by a goal to offer passengers opportunities to discover new worlds. However, many of the cultural representations displayed on cruise ships were pastiches—essentializations drawn from popular media forms and based in Eurocentrism. These were meant to be entertaining, not accurate, representations. Nevertheless, as themed environments gained momentum, these cultural forms helped to transform ships into destinations in their own right—a process through which cruise lines produced a captive audience to siphon passenger spending from the Caribbean. At the same time, cruise lines leveraged their mediating power and economic influence to hide from passengers the supposed poverty, crime, and disease at Caribbean ports, and even the mundanities of daily life there, while increasingly installing mechanisms to appropriate spending from those who chose to debark the ship. These processes intensified as the decades advanced. This study thus finds that cultural homogenization did not result in an immediately apparent reduction of difference, because difference was profitable and central to the mass-market cruise industry’s advertising strategies. However, the surface-level cultural heterogeneity that cruises offered was reduced through a homogenizing vision that balanced novelty with passenger comfort, engagement, and convenience in support of corporate profits. The resulting cultural production process was not suggestive of glocalization, but rather a new phenomenon meriting further research.