Speaking to TTG onboard the brand’s newest and largest ship, Wonder of the Seas, during its European launch last week, Torey Kings-Hodkin, head of UK sales, said recruitment was underway to grow its current team of six key account managers to nine. 

The news follows the appointment of former Celebrity Cruises strategic account manager Ruth Gardiner to senior development manager last month, whose hiring came alongside that of Tracey Bartlam and Kirsty Reid as key account managers, while Royal also named Rachel Oakes as sales development manager.

“We’ve really invested in our new trade sales team, it’s fantastic to have been able to offer up these three new roles, which will support our new senior manager hires,” said Kings-Hodkin.

“So many people had such a tough time through the pandemic with redundancies, so to be able to go out there into market and put new opportunities out has been really satisfying.”

Discussing the issue of staffing in the wider cruise sector, Ben Bouldin, Royal’s vice-president EMEA, told TTG getting crewing levels back to full strength "had been difficult". 

“There are people who have left the industry because they had to go do something else for a couple of years, so we are having to find new people, and trying to find people to recruit for 26 ships in a short space of time isn’t an easy task," he said.

“We’re getting there but our crew have to be trained well and we have to make sure we get it right, it’s not an area we’ll compromise on.”

Bouldin said Royal would be willing to sail with fewer guests onboard if it was not able to offer the right amount of crew, rather than compromise its service. 

He added that the numbers of staff returning to the line "at the drop of a hat" were "fantastic". 

Assessing passenger volumes over the coming year, Bouldin said Royal did not predict it would pass 2019 levels this year but had set its sights on 2023 as the year it reached full recovery.

“2023 is going to be much bigger than 2019, we’ll probably come in just shy of 2019 this year but 2023 will bounce right back - extra deployment, upgraded hardware at key ports and destinations and a lot of activity planned will help us to get there," he said.

Kings-Hodkin added: “We’ve been building momentum really nicely over the past three months, we’ve seen volumes actually surpassing 2019 levels certainly in more recent weeks which is a really encouraging sign and I think that will continue the more we get into the summer season.

“We’ve seven ships that’ll be in the Mediterranean this year, we’ve got Anthem of the Seas out of Southampton, it’s a huge investment for us into Europe and we’re seeing fantastic momentum.”

Looking at summer demand for Europe as the Ukraine conflict continues, Bouldin said he believed American customers were "nervous" of travelling in the region.

"They’ve seen Europe and they don’t really understand the geography of it and where Russia and Ukraine sit,” he said.

However, he added markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were showing resilience.

“The UK is booking holidays and so are Spain, France and Germany. The Baltic markets are a bit slow, but the big markets in Europe are going well, particularly Israel.”

South Africa “hadn’t come back yet”, said Bouldin, while Serbia and Croatia were both beginning to pick up but were still “patchy”.

“We’re having to be sensible on how we spend money and acquire guests where we see momentum and be quite agile where we push and promote,” he said.