• Royal Caribbean will divert the Enchantment of the Seas to Samana, D.R. instead of St. Thomas tomorrow. Tuesday, she will drop anchor in Labadee then head back to Baltimore. Oasis of the Seas which is in Nassau today, will stay longer in Nassau and then skip the Virgin Islands all together and finish her cruise up with Costa Maya and Cozumel.
• NCL will do something similar with the Epic. They will sail her to Cozumel and Costa Maya for the week, and extend her call in Nassau on Friday. Norwegian Dawn currently has no announced alterations, but they can be expected per the lines site.

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So far there has actually been one alteration. The Carnival Dream out of Port Canaveral will sail her western Caribbean cruise instead of her eastern Caribbean.

image from StormPulse

Carnival Breeze has been selected as the name for the line’s new 130,000-ton cruise ship scheduled to enter service in spring 2012.

To be constructed by Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri, the 3,690-passenger Carnival Breeze will be the third in the line’s Dream class.  The series’ namesake vessel, Carnival Dream, entered service in 2009 and a sister ship, Carnival Magic, is currently under construction at Fincantieri and is scheduled to debut in Europe in May 2011.

Carnival Breeze will offer many of the popular innovations featured on Carnival Dream as well as some exciting and unique new elements created just for this vessel that will be detailed at a later date, along with homeport and itinerary information.

“Carnival Breeze promises to be a spectacular addition to our fleet and its name reflects the continued evolution of our brand while conveying the fun and carefree spirit associated with a Carnival cruise,” said Gerry Cahill, Carnival president and CEO.

Signature Dream-class elements featured on Carnival Breeze will include expansive facilities for children and teens, a 23,750-square-foot Cloud 9 Spa and The Lanai, an outdoor promenade featuring cantilevered whirlpools that extend over the ship’s sides.

Other features will include a WaterWorks aqua park with a 300-foot-long corkscrew water slide, a stunning indoor/outdoor café and live entertainment venue called Ocean Plaza and a wide range of staterooms including deluxe ocean views with two bathrooms, some of which feature five berths and hold particular appeal for families.

Carnival Breeze will be the 24th vessel in Carnival Cruise Lines’ fleet, which operates three- to 15-day voyages to The Bahamas, Caribbean, Mexican Riviera, Alaska, Hawaii, Panama Canal, Canada, New England, Bermuda and Europe.

Source Carnival-News.com

source (flickr)

The christening will take place today at 4:00pm EST.

Click here to watch the Live Christening at 4:00pm EST.

Live shots as of 11:50pm.

Carnival Dream as seen from Pied Piper Travel’s webcam

Midtown Manhattan as seen from Carnival Dream’s webcam.

In an attempt to upstage Royal Caribbean and their Oasis of the Seas’, you’d think think that they would get a bigger name. Carnival has a lot of capitol available to them. I have a feeling this event will make news on the cruise blogs and that’s it. Oasis will be appearing on mainstream news outlets etc. getting all sorts of publicity. If Carnival isn’t competing with RCCL on the WOW factor on the water, I would think that they would try to have a WOW ceremony in the big apple. The event will be streamed live online so we’ll see how it goes.

If I were in their shoes I would have chosen Chesley Sullenberger. Yes I know its supposed to be female but Its just a thought to make a big bang with the event. The media LOVES him, and he’s an Idol in NYC. If you want publicity do this. Of course it does go against years of tradition, but think with Royal Caribbean having 7 godmothers and the Dream already has a godchild of the waterpark. If there was a time to break and be pretty liberal with tradition; now is it!  I think John Heald’s choice has always been Angelina Jolie and that would work too, but I’m not sure if they get paid for this. But I am not running Carnival…

Here to hoping Carnival’s event goes without a hitch and is a success.

The Oasis is back and settled in from the Sea trials. In fact all the crew have been assigned and will start arriving soon.

I have absolutely no idea why NCL is so tight lipped about the Epic. As you can tell from my Epic page, there has not been a significant  update in a while.

So please be patient while these things are built.  As always once an update hits of photos leak, they will be here up immediately.

The contest involved kids submitting an essay and a drawing to be voted by the public. The winner gets this “honor.”

To me, just seems like a PR move and nothing more. I’ll tell you this much, I have never heard of a waterpark godchild before and there isn’t a nautical significance of it. Just another way to keep the Dream in the headlines while it sails around the Med, killing time before it makes the big trip “across the pond.”

Mr. Arison continued on to state that the reason they don’t wish to build larger is the lack of flexibility they have for itineraries. The opposite of Oasis.

The Oasis has to have special accommodations made wherever she sails. Lets see: A pier has to be built in the tender port of Labadee (RCI’s private beach NOT Island), St. Maarten is upgrading facilities, a completely new port is being devolved in Falmouth, Jamaica (which ironically won’t be ready in time!), Grand Cayman is being avoided entirely. Interesting note about Grand Cayman, the cruise lines have threatened to pull out of Grand Cayman if a pier is not built. There can easily be a total of seven ships or more a day during the peek Caribbean winter season.

Back to Carnival’s decision. This is a pretty interesting reason given that Carnival is the only major line to not seasonally send a majority of its ships to seasonal destinations(i.e. Europe, Alaska, Canada & New England, Bermuda). What carnival does instead is build up the secondary embarkation ports. Ports such as Jacksonville, Mobile, Tampa, and of course Galveston. The ships here are based year-round instead of seasonally (i.e. Royal Caribbean). If Carnival were to have their project Pinnacle built at lets say 240-250,000 grt. There would pretty much be only the overcrowded Caribbean for routes. If they were to place an order for say 4-5 of these then you would need more places to sail. In this aspect I would guess that the size does limit.

Take what you may from the statement of Carnival’s main man in charge, but I think this may be the end of the ego battle between him and Richard Fain (RCI’s President and CEO).

Once the market stabilized it would not surprise me to see Carnival go their “vista route”  and order a few smaller than the Dream, but big enough to have lots of amenities. These ships I could see and being PANAMAX(2014), so just a large Spirit class, but the same purpose.

Any thought are welcomed here as always.

-Greg

Update: Changed the typo. Thanks to those who noticed.

Update Friday Oct. 9 11:56: Having given more though to the subject, has there ever been a  time where Micky Arison got it wrong. The guy is a genius of the industry. Here we are in a global economic downfall, and here is Carnival with a strong future. No tremendous debt on the books, and most major contracts finishing up. I believe he is on the right track with investigation Asian shipyards for future work. I know some of those yards are on the verge of disaster. The bottom falling out on break-bulk cargo is not helping anything for new construction.

On Royal Caribbeans side, they have high debt on the books. They are borrowing from several banks for the construction of Oasis, Celebrity Solstice and Equinox. But they will be able to attract customers with the WOW factor of Oasis. This could be a critical factor in marketing the ship to fill up the 5,000 beds every week.

• The Carnival Dream page now has photos of her pulling into Venice while still on her maiden voyage.

• The Oasis of the Seas page now has some external shots of her departing Turku Finland at the commencement of her 2nd seatrials.

Carnival reported that it earned 1 Billion (not million) this summer. This is good news as Micky Arison stated that guests are now booking more and more in advance, meaning the market is rebounding.

NCL is launching a new marketing project for the Norwegian Epic. Concentrated on social media (a genius move on their part I believe)  and online advertising.  You will soon be seeing the phrases “That’s Epic” ; “A world class resort that likes to travel” ; “Blurring the line between journey and destination” ; “7 days that will make your whole year” ; “200 feet of OMG”; and “A butler and a concierge might sound excessive. That’s the point.”  Props to NCL for jumping on the social media/new media bandwagon. That is where the future of advertising lays. Now if only they can exploit their twitter to its fullest extent.