The $245m price tag is a figure that the cruise sales and purchase market hasn’t seen in years, but that is what Royal Caribbean Group’s Silversea Cruises was willing to pay to get its hands on what some have described as the best luxury expedition cruise ship of its class afloat.
Silversea has confirmed that it has acquired Crystal Cruises’ 20,500-dwt polar class cruise ship Crystal Endeavor (built 2021) from the liquidators of collapsed parent company Genting Hong Kong.
To put that price in perspective, it is nearly double the combined $128m that Manfredi Lefebvre d’Ovidio’s Abercrombie & Kent paid for Crystal’s 68,900-gt Crystal Serenity (built 2003) and 51,000-gt Crystal Symphony (built 1995) at auction in June.
TradeWinds first reported the Crystal Endeavor sale on 16 June, at which time Silversea declined to comment.
This week the cruise operator was in a far chattier mood. President and CEO Roberto Martinoli, in press statements, extolled the virtues of the ship’s PC6 polar class specifications and luxurious interiors, claiming that adding it to the Silversea fleet will “accelerate our strategy of growth, enriching our offering to unprecedented levels and reaffirming our position as the leading ultra-luxury expedition cruise line”.
Martinoli painted a bullish picture of the expedition cruise sector, saying it was poised to resume accelerated growth “driven by demand among high-end, affluent customers for travel to remote and hard-to-access destinations".
The Crystal Endeavor, which has been idle since the January collapse of Crystal, will re-enter service as the Silver Endeavor in November. Its first deployment will be a set of cruises to Antarctica.
Silversea said it would protect the deposits of Crystal customers who had booked on the ship, allowing them to offset the amount they had paid against a cruise on any Silversea ship.
The acquisition is being financed by a 15-year unsecured term loan guaranteed by German export credit agency Euler Hermes.
The ship will replace the 6,200-gt expedition cruise ship Silver Explorer (built 1989) that Silversea sold to new French cruise operator Exploris in January.
As Crystal Endeavor, it was delivered by Genting’s in-house shipbuilder MV Werften only months before the company collapsed.
Silversea was the first luxury high-end cruise operator to branch into the expedition cruise niche. Since being acquired by Royal Caribbean in 2018, it has been gradually phasing out its original expedition cruise ships. They have been replaced by a pair of Silversea's conventional cruise ships that were extensively upgraded for polar cruising, along with a newbuilding designed specifically to operate in the Galapagos archipelago.
