On board, Weight Watchers staff will host meetings for “real-time guidance and support” and present customized fitness programs, cooking demonstrations, and seminars from wellness experts. The week-long voyage will also have four ports of calls at which passengers can hike, snorkel, dive, and pursue other physical activities, Sasso said. The May Divina itinerary will stop in Jamaica; Grand Cayman; Cozumel, Mexico; and the Bahamas.
“I think this is more a perfect scenario than the other type of vacation that one can take,” Sasso said, calling the cruise “a controlled environment” for Weight Watchers’ members. “We’re making our cruise products already have this wellness aspect.” The May wellness-themed cruise, he said, “is just an enhancement.”
For Geneva-based MSC, and for such larger U.S. peers as Carnival Corp., Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd., and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., shifting the public’s notion of cruising as an oceangoing gallery of gluttony to one of an upscale holiday that embraces fine dining and active lifestyles is critical to attracting a younger, more affluent demographic. The cruise industry of the 1980s, for example, is nothing like today's cruise lines’ offerings. The industry has been working feverishly to tout that message and to increase its customer base, with an estimated 25.3 million people expected to cruise this year, up from 15.8 million a decade ago.
Cruise ships also offer no more dietary vice than the average U.S. city, given an abundance of food and drink choices that are far from healthy, Sasso argued. “That temptation is everywhere you go,” he said. “Unless you go to an isolated place in the jungle, you’re going to have temptation everywhere.”
The newer ships also devote increasing real estate to their spas—a revenue source, to be sure—and most have extensive gyms stocked with equipment, Sasso noted. “When you have 20,000-square-foot spas on a cruise ship, that is unparalleled in the hotel industry, unless you’re in some huge resort.”
For cruise lines, affinity groups of the wellness sort that Weight Watchers is heading also tend to mean higher revenues, and margins. The $945 minimum fare on MSC, for example, is higher than the company would otherwise command for many of its berths for the same week. That’s one reason for the proliferation of theme cruises, from Star Trek to country western music to a Holland America Line Alaska cruise focused on O, The Oprah Magazine, Winfrey’s monthly lifestyle periodical.
If a weight-control or sci-fi cruise seems extraordinarily niche-y, they get even more specialized. In November, starting at €799 ($852) per person, you can join TV actor David Hasselhoff in the Mediterranean for a five-day “Official World Fan Cruise.”
“Not only will we be at sea, which is really sexy, we’re going to be rocking and rolling,” Hasselhoff says in a video pitch for the cruise.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.