A QUIET culture war has been playing out across the cruise sector over the past few years, and it centres on the use of the word ‘cruise’ itself.
This word, which has defined what the sector does since it began to take its modern shape in the 1970s, is now increasingly no longer seen as fit-for-purpose by many of the largest players in the industry.
The past few years have seen the brands formerly known as Silversea Cruises and Crystal Cruises lose their eponymous suffix and simplify to just Silversea and Crystal.
This subtle rebranding has taken place for a few reasons – Crystal made the move following its 2023 relaunch under Abercrombie & Kent Travel Group, a company with a mostly land-based presence.
Silversea said its shift, which was made the year after, emphasised its move toward its land-based portfolio of experiences, and away from its identity as just a cruise line.
At the time of the move, the brand was rolling out its SALT program (Sea and Land Taste) of shore experiences designed to connect passengers to the destinations they visit through their culinary culture and history.
Silversea is now also preparing to launch a hotel, The Cormorant at 55 South in southern Chile, which it said will be the southernmost resort in the world.
With these developments in mind, one can assess it to be fair that Silversea has navigated away from the word ‘cruises’ and toward a less-specific brand.
“We gradually want to become an experiential travel company, not necessarily only cruise, and that comes with a big evolution to our product,” SVP and managing director Adam Radwanski said during a panel discussion at the Travel24 conference in Sydney in 2024, around the time the brand was rolling out the SALT program in Australia.
He said the evolution followed a post-COVID shift in Silversea’s market of affluent travellers, and their desire to “escape into the world”.
“In the past, the definition of a luxury customer, whether [they were] cruise or non-cruise, was that if you had money, you wanted to separate yourself from the rest, go to a secluded island, have your villa and not see other people,” he explained.
“Post-COVID trends that we see are that people want to live like locals, people want to party like locals, and they want to eat like locals, and that’s what we are trying to roll out.”
From that perspective, any cynical reading of Silversea’s move is easy to counter: the line’s passengers were changing and its product was evolving to reflect them.
However not all cruise lines see it this way, and those that don’t are not just stuck in the past.
Atlas Ocean Voyages, which is among the newest cruise lines in the world, is committed to doing things differently, chief executive officer James Rodriguez said. However, this does not mean it will be leaning away from its DNA as a cruise line.
“We are a cruise company first, we’re programmed as that…I like to say we’re a cruise company that just happens to have hotel rooms,” he told travelBulletin.
Rodriguez noted that many of the hotel brands building their own ships, such as the new Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection (RCYC), Four Seasons Yachts, and Aman at Sea, have all avoided aligning their product alongside traditional cruise brands.
Much of this centres on their broad strategy of converting their hotel loyalty guests into cruise passengers, as recently outlined by RCYC senior vice president global sales and service Patrick Mitchell.
However Rodriguez believes this may turn out to be a self-defeating strategy.
“There is a certain aspect of a cruise guest that you can’t disrespect…cruisers love the cruise experience, and when hotel brands come in and say, ‘we’re not a cruise product, we’re a hotel product, we just happen to have a ship’, it doesn’t encourage other cruisers to try their product,” he added.
Crucially, the distinction has little to do with price or perceived luxury. Regent Seven Seas Cruises (RSSC), which is widely considered to top both of those categories, is making no attempt to soften or obscure its identity as a cruise line.
RSSC launched a soft rebrand at the end of 2024, debuting a new tagline ‘Unrivalled at sea’, explicitly tying the marque to the sector it operates in.
“There are some new brands incoming to the market that talk about not wanting to be a cruise ship…well, we want to be a cruise ship,” senior vice president international and consumer sales Steve Odell told travelBulletin at the time of the rebrand.
“You’ll see us say ‘Unrivalled at sea’, because there has sort of been a push to say, ‘we’re a cruise ship, but we’re not really, we’re a resort’.
“Well, we’re a cruise company, and what we’re saying is, we’re unrivalled in our space at sea.”
As more cruise lines reassess how they present themselves to the market, the question may be: “Which side of the divide do you fall on, and why?”
