David Jones was Carnival Australia’s corporate communications manager from 2009 to 2022. Now he laments the departing of the best leaders our cruise industry had and asks: what happens next?
As P&O Cruises Australia prepares to sail its last summer cruise season, the cream of Australia’s cruising industry gathered recently in an upstairs lounge at Darling Harbour’s historic Pyrmont Bridge Hotel.
It was a get-together to farewell two of the local industry’s leading lights, Stuart Allison and Ryan Taibel. Stuart Allison hasn’t been lost to cruising — he is soon off to Britain to take up a senior role at P&O UK.
Two conclusions are inescapable. The demise of P&O Australia has sparked a significant loss of talent from the local industry. It is also seeing the departure of members of the “Ann Sherry Generation”.
It raises a number of questions about the future prospects of the Australian cruise industry. Will year round cruising remain a local feature? Have the authorities made it just too expensive for cruise companies to operate profitably in this market?
One thing we do know is that we have steadily seen the departure of the “Ann Sherry Generation” of leaders who were at the forefront of the decade-plus years of exponential growth.
Brand warriors including Stuart Allison and Ryan Taibel provided the ballast for Sherry’s audacious goal, as CEO of Carnival Australia, to see a million Australians cruising by 2020.
The fact that the goal was reached five years early is testament to Sherry’s drive, determination, ambition for the industry and sheer courage in a career sense to make it happen.
Sherry recruited a band of loyal lieutenants and, together, they didn’t just change one thing. They changed everything about local cruising to transform the product and the perception of it.
As the P&O fleet grew ultimately to five ships and Princess consolidated its long-term presence in Australia, the rest of the world took notice and sent their ships for the abundant opportunities in a growing market.
So, it’s time to drop the nostalgia lens. Sad as it is and, while marketers infer that P&O Australia is merely being folded into Carnival Cruise Line, the reality is that the foundation brand of Australian cruising is going, going and almost gone.
With one summer season to go, 2024-25 will seem like any other rather than a swansong for Australia’s oldest cruise line. There will, however, be plenty of tears come March.
Look a little further ahead and it seems inevitable that capacity will take a hit with at least some retreat in the number of Australians cruising. After all, Pacific Explorer will be gone and Cunard’s local seasons will be no more.
It will be interesting to see if year round cruising from Australia remains intact. In being run from here, P&O effectively anchored the full year presence along with Princess’s home ported ships.
The cruise industry doesn’t tend to pick arguments with governments. Shipping is a highly regulated activity, and, at that, by multiple tiers of government.
The industry is unlikely to say it out loud but there was always a suspicion that governments didn’t value cruising other than to assume the ships were sailing on oceans of gold and bringing it with them.
Far too often came unilateral edicts on fees and charges accompanied by a take it or leave it attitude.
From time to time, there were subtle hints that cruise ships, being mobile assets, didn’t really have to be here and could easily sail away.
However, taking ships out of this market was unlikely when an entire corporate structure, now reduced, supporting the ships was located here.
Who is to say that won’t happen now that more decisions, strategic and operational, are being made in America rather than here?
Authorities responsible for Australia’s prohibitively expensive port charges should accept at least some responsibility for any uncertainty that now prevails.
It is why Victoria’s decision to whack up port fees came as such a hammer blow and had cruise lines saying sayonara, enough is enough.
International cruise lines can’t be expected to send their ships halfway around the world only to be bled dry by fees and charges.
As the P&O years come to a close, the question of the cruise line’s special relationship with the South Pacific in which, for example, hundreds of Ni Vanuatu crew have worked on its ships also comes into focus. Will that special relationship that made such a big economic and community contribution in the Pacific Islands, one of Ann Sherry’s passion projects, continue?
When the years of double-digit annual growth were going full tilt, who could have imagined that Australia would be saying goodbye to its homegrown cruise line and that uncertainty would pervade the local industry’s growth prospects?
And now weakened by a much diluted talent pool minus a generation of leaders who helped build an industry almost from scratch.
