Uniworld president Ellen Bettridge praised UK and Ireland managing director Chris Townson, who is now based in Australia, for the work he and his team have done to grow its UK business.
She tipped UK to surpass the current top international source market – Australia – in the coming months.
“The US is 70% of our business,” said Bettridge. “Chris and the team are now very close to Australia – they’ve done a phenomenal job.
“The UK has got a very good chance of being the second market. Brits love Italy, all of France, and India.”
In June, Uniworld will host 50 UK agents on a seven-night Ganges cruise to enable the trade to experience one of its best-performing products.
The 56-passenger Ganges Voyager 2 will operate the sailing which will be filled with agents who have either achieved certain sales volumes or have close ties with the ultra-luxury line.
Bettridge confirmed at the Clia RiverView conference in Amsterdam that the number of British passengers travelling to India to cruise with Uniworld had reached record levels.
Townson believes Uniworld is the only luxury river cruise operator to take so many agents on a fam trip to India.
“I don’t think that anyone in the luxury space is doing anything like that,” he explained. “How else do you get them to touch and feel the product?”
When asked where Uniworld was thinking of adding capacity, Bettridge hinted that the line could add a second ship on the Douro, the Rhone and the Mekong.
But she added: “It’s always going to be slow growth. You don’t add 10 ships at once.”
Rival luxury river line AmaWaterways is launching its first of two ships on Colombia’s Magdalena River later this year.
Bettridge, though, said although she had explored the possibility of deploying a vessel there, currently the infrastructure wasn’t available.
She said: “88% of our capacity is in Europe. It’s good to have strong demand. We don’t want too much capacity.”
Bettridge revealed that the company had now sold the second of two U by Uniworld ships to Dutch cruise operators. The first vessel was sold last year.
U by Uniworld launched in 2017 and was aimed at travellers aged between 21 and 45.
“After Covid it did not make sense to have these ships,” Bettridge explained. “We made a decision to sell them. We sold one ship last year and the other quite recently.
"The whole U by Uniworld brand has gone. We’re going to focus on what we do best which is deliver luxury cruises.”
