Gregor Gerlach freely admits he never wanted to launch Riverside Luxury Cruises with five ships in its fleet – but that’s ultimately what happened.
He first saw a gap in the luxury market in 2017, which he intended to fill with “two or three” river ships at most.
Coincidently, Crystal River Cruises was ramping up its river cruise programme with the launch of Crystal Mozart in 2016, Crystal Bach and Crystal Mahler in 2017, and then Crystal Debussy and Crystal Ravel in 2018.
However, Riverside’s co-owners – Gerlach and his sister Anouchka – saw their ambition to operate a river line alongside their luxury hotel portfolio Seaside Collection, with its 11 Europe and Maldives properties, stall after they started making shipyard enquiries, and discovered Europe’s shipbuilding industry was “busy”.
Their dream, though, was revived early last year when Crystal Cruises declared bankruptcy.
“With the Crystal news, we started looking at launching a river line again,” Gerlach said.
Riverside Luxury Cruises bought Crystal Mozart in November 2022, before acquiring the four remaining Crystal ships in early 2023. And the luxury line hit the headlines last month when it was announced Uniworld will charter Riverside Bach and Riverside Mahler for three years.
“When we began, we got five ships at once,” Gerlach explained. “I would have started with two or three, but we didn’t have a choice. When the chance came up to postpone the launch of two of our ships for a few years, we took it.”
As of today, Riverside has launched two of its ships – Riverside Mozart and Riverside Ravel. Gerlach, though, believes that things need to change with two ships in the water and another launching in March.
The UK team has been restructured; Stuart Perl, Riverside managing director UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, MEA and Australia, has been replaced by Charlie Hewitt-Davies, who will also oversee Seaside Collection’s hotel portfolio.
A search is now on for a business development manager, which will grow the UK team to three with Jon Knight heading up trade sales.
“Stuart did a great job setting up the company and the systems,” Gerlach said. “But I think we’re still struggling in the UK because we’re not known as well as in other European countries.
The UK is still our smallest market, so we decided to operate with more of a combined focus – the ships and the hotels.
"The UK is a very strong river cruise market. We need to tell potential customers why they should pay a bit more to take a luxury sailing with us.”
Despite the need to boost UK business, Gerlach said Hewitt-Davies has no short-term targets, but stressed her focus would be on growing revenue.
GETTING CLOSER TO AGENTS
Explaining why Riverside shuffled its pack in the UK, Gerlach said: “Our goal is to have more synergies between the ships and the hotels. Across all of our hotels, the UK is the number one or two market – we want the same with Riverside Luxury Cruises.”
Until now, he believes Riverside has been “too far away” from UK agents.
“That’s why we’ve restructured the team – we want to be closer to agents. I think agents selling river cruise are selling the best product in the market – river cruise lines offer something no one else does.”
It now remains to be seen whether the recent structural changes at Riverside and Seaside have the desired effect before Riverside’s fleet expands to five ships in just a few years’ time.
