Cruise companies

Make no mistake: although there are many different cruise companies and cruise ship owners operating ocean cruises, the sector is dominated by three major publicly listed cruise groups. This is hardly surprising amid the current cruise boom: the enormous cruise ships now being built to meet market demand cost hundreds of millions of euros—sums that smaller companies can hardly afford.

In recent years, the major cruise companies have bought many brands in the cruise sector, but this consolidation has not led to the disappearance of those brands. The established cruise lines continue to operate under their old names. So, for cruisers searching for “their cruise” and “their ship,” very little has changed.

Cruise company Carnival Corporation & plc

The world’s largest cruise company is the publicly listed Carnival Corporation & plc. Carnival Corporation owns major brands in the cruise business. Its companies include Carnival Cruise Lines, Holland-America Line (HAL), Cunard Line, P&O Cruises, Princess Cruises, Seabourn Cruise Line, Costa Cruises, AIDA Cruises (as the German branch of Costa) and Ibero Cruceros. The group also included the Ocean Village brand, which was discontinued at the end of 2010. Based in Miami, Florida, United States, Carnival Corporation & plc currently operates 81 cruise ships across its various companies (as of 2010) and is expanding rapidly. It is currently the world’s largest cruise company. The British-American cruise company is registered in Panama City, Panama, and London, United Kingdom.

Cruise company Royal Caribbean Cruises

Close behind is Royal Caribbean Cruises, also headquartered in Miami, Florida. (Incidentally, the US-Norwegian company is officially registered in the commercial register in Monrovia, Liberia.) Royal Caribbean Cruises currently comprises five subsidiaries: Celebrity Cruises, Royal Caribbean International, Pullmantur Cruises, Azamara Club Cruises and CDF Croisières de France. Royal Caribbean also holds a 50 percent stake in TUI Cruises.

Genting Hong Kong, formerly Star Cruises Limited

The third big player among cruise companies is the Asian group Genting Hong Kong, formerly known as Star Cruises Limited. Genting’s brands include Star Cruises—Asia-Pacific, which operates almost exclusively in the Asian market, as well as NCL, well known in Germany too—Norwegian Cruise Line, which once revolutionized the European market with its Freestyle Cruising concept.

Together, the three largest cruise companies account for more than 75% of all available berths at sea, and the trend towards megaships will push this share even higher in the coming years. A major European cruise company such as MSC Cruises—or even the remaining independent German cruise ship operators, such as Hapag-Lloyd Cruises, Transocean Tours of Bremen, or Deilmann Shipping Company, associated with Germany’s cruise tradition—looks almost tiny beside these giants. However, they offer alternatives to megaships. With the MS Europa, for example, Hapag-Lloyd Cruises offers a top ship that Douglas Ward has repeatedly rated the best cruise ship in the world.

River cruises—a segment with many cruise companies

Consolidation has also begun in river cruising, although it is nowhere near as pronounced as in ocean cruising. The world’s largest operator with its own fleet is Viking River Cruises AG, based in Switzerland and operating in Germany as Viking River Cruises. The company was founded only at the end of the last century. River cruise companies have many more niches to choose from, and the ships required are far less expensive to build and maintain than the megaships used for ocean cruises. As a result, many major river cruise operators can be found in different countries, often specializing in rivers in their home country. It is also common in this sector to distinguish between the ship’s actual owner and the cruise operator, which runs the river vessel under a full or partial charter. One important German cruise company is A-Rosa River Cruises, which operates in the upmarket segment. A-Rosa offers river cruises on the Danube, the Rhine, and the French rivers Rhône and Saône.