Genting Cruise Lines (GCL)’s announcement that its pioneer Star Cruises brand is to lose yet another ship could be taken as a sign that it is being run down.
But a Genting spokesperson said this week that nothing could be further from the truth.
GCL, the cruise arm of Genting Hong Kong, revealed late last month that it would transfer Star Cruises’ flagship, the 75,300-gt SuperStar Virgo (built 1999), across to its upmarket Dream Cruises brand next March.
Before joining Dream Cruises as the Explorer Dream, the ship will be given a $30m upgrade. It will be based in Tianjin and Shanghai during the northern hemisphere summer and operate in Australian and New Zealand waters in the winter.
Confidence in Asian market
These winter cruises will be sold primarily to the Asian market, indicating that GCL is confident the cruise market there has matured enough to warrant deploying ships catering to Asian passengers outside of the region.
Star Cruises will not disappear. At the moment, we are on a roll with the Dream Cruises brand, so it is getting most of our attention
GCL has been expanding the fleets of its premium Dream Cruises and Crystal Cruises brands. But Star Cruises, which put mass-market cruising on the Asian radar in 1993, has been contracting.
When the SuperStar Virgo departs, Star Cruises will be left with three medium-size cruiseships dating from the early 1990s and a smaller 3,400-gt cruiseship used for VIP charters. Earlier this year, the cruise line lost another ship when the 42,300-gt SuperStar Libra (built 1988) was sent to Wismar in Germany to be used as an accommodation ship for workers at the Genting Hong Kong-owned MV Werften.
Those workers will be building the two 201,000-gt cruiseships that GCL originally ordered for Star Cruises but that have been reallocated to the Dream Cruises fleet.
TradeWinds asked GCL this week whether this could be taken as a signal that Star Cruises was being wound down and would eventually disappear. The spokesman immediately dismissed this suggestion.
“Star Cruises will not disappear. At the moment, we are on a roll with the Dream Cruises brand, so it is getting most of our attention,” he said. “But there are plans being worked on for Star Cruises. The company has its niche and it will not be neglected. Down the road, it will get new ships, although perhaps not on such a large scale as the Dream Cruises ships.”
He explained that the large size of the duo on order at MV Werften made them a better fit in the fleet of Dream Cruises, which currently operates two 150,000-gt cruiseships.
Genting Hong Kong has pumped huge amounts of cash into its cruise operations in recent years. In addition to buying up several German shipyards to create MV Werften and building Dream Cruises’ first two ships at Meyer Werft, it acquired luxury brand Crystal Cruises from Japan’s NYK Line.
Crystal Cruises has since been getting a lot of investment attention, with orders placed at MV Werften for a series of 19,500-gt expedition ships and a series of 67,000-gt cruiseships.
The yard has also built three river cruiseships for the company, with a fourth acquired on the secondhand market.
