Agents tell TTG that as well as buoyant demand for the busy summer peak season, there has been particularly strong demand for itineraries departing in the second quarter.
Richard Cross, from Southampton Cruise Centre, told TTG: “The ex-UK market has been really strong and is up year-on-year with cruise lines putting in more capacity this year.
“The bulk of summer 2024 bookings are for the Med, while a lot of late bookings are for ex-UK departures for northern Europe in the next three months. The Med and the Canaries are our top-selling cruise destinations.”
Bolsover Cruise Club marketing manager Danny Forsythe said ex-UK cruises were proving “very popular” with its clients, with P&O Cruises “tending to dominate our business”. “We’re doing a lot of ex-UK," he told TTG. "As well as the P&O ships, you also have Sky Princess, the Cunard fleet and MSC Virtuoso.
"The first two weeks of wave didn’t set the world alight, but after that, business really took off. It seemed to be linked to the school holidays and kids going back a bit later this year.”
Forsythe said April to June 2024 was currently the most popular travel period, with Bolsover also seeing a 45% year-on-year rise in cruise-and-stay packages. Forsythe said the agency’s recently launched bookable website was also paying dividends by helping secure more new customers.
Edwina Lonsdale, managing director of Mundy Cruising, said she was "astonished" by Mundy’s January sales so far, which had surpassed the agency’s “amazing start” to 2023.
“There’s huge demand for bucket-list trips, from travelling to Antarctica in top suites to combining Alaska with Rocky Mountaineer," she said. "We’ve been inundated with requests for once-in-a-lifetime trips."
Henbury Travel managing director Richard Slater, meanwhile, described wave trading as "fairly strong", but said bookings for P&O Cruises’ Caribbean cruises had "fallen off a cliff", something he attributed to the uncertainty around the line’s charter programme for next year’s itineraries.
