Regent Seven Seas Cruises is already releasing its collection of luxury voyages for the 2024-2025 season, officially opening bookings on Aug. 24, 2022, and pre-registering interest now.
Itineraries will extend all the way around the world to every single continent. Among the offerings are a pair of unique 14-night sailings in Alaska (instead of the line’s usual weeklong routes in the region) and additional cruises in Western Europe, as well as the line’s upcoming Seven Seas Grandeur in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and Canada and New England.
Andrea DeMarco, chief sales and marketing officer for Regent Seven Seas Cruises
Credit: 2022 Regent Seven Seas Cruises
To discuss the massive itinerary release and more of the line’s latest developments, we sat down with Andrea DeMarco, chief sales and marketing officer at Regent.
What is the significance for travel agents and their clients of Regent revealing its voyages through 2025?
It's a really exciting time. When you take a 50,000-foot view of the luxury space, you're seeing unprecedented demand for once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences. That, coupled with the unrivaled experience that Regent delivers, is resulting in our sailings selling out, and in record numbers and in record time.
For the new season launch, guests can already pre-register their interests. It opens for sale on Aug. 24, but it's a huge opportunity for our travel partners to capitalize on this strong demand for luxury experiences and really help to grow their business.
The collection [of 160 new voyages] has sailings ranging from seven nights all the way to 150 nights. It has the 2025 World Cruise, “Away in Wonder.” It also features four Grand Voyages, and each of them has this epic adventure to dozens of ports across multiple weeks. We've got maiden calls to 18 new ports across the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. We're going to include 130 overnights and then some immersive explorations.
These voyages are curated to provide our guests the chance to experience new cultures, gain new perspectives and travel the world again, which is something they haven't been able to do.
And the 2025 World Cruise has already sold out, correct?
Yes, it's amazing. The demand for luxury experiences is quite strong. It's the fourth consecutive year we've seen our world cruise sell out in record time.
It's the fourth consecutive year we've seen our world cruise sell out in record time.
Seven Seas Mariner was completely reserved before we officially started accepting bookings for the sailing. This sailing is 150 nights. So, it's the longest cruise in the line's history.
And one of the interesting things that I think really tells that demand story is that not only was this reserved by loyal past guests, who tend to love the world cruise experience, but over one-third of guests who registered and booked are new to Regent’s unrivaled experience.
You definitely have guests who weren't able to book because they weren't vaccinated. So, I think that opens the door for all luxury travelers to come and sail onboard our brand.
We relaxed the restrictions to be closer in line with the rest of travel, leisure and hospitality around the world. We still have very good SailSafe health and safety protocols. And you have to test if you're unvaccinated to come on the cruise.
So, health and safety is still a priority for us, but now we're taking that next step as we move through the transitional year of getting back to more of a normal environment.
Will the new Seven Seas Grandeur launching next year differ at all from its sister ships?
Sister ships to Grandeur — Seven Seas Explorer and Seven Seas Splendor — were game-changers for the brand and for the luxury space. Grandeur will again build on the success of a three-decade-long history of bringing these ships to light.
This ship in particular was inspired by our heritage. It will harmonize elegance, comfort, freedom and choice, and really elevate our unrivaled experience. Our designer, Studio Dado, has done a magnificent job of really marrying that comfort, elegance and style, but in a fresh and exciting new way. So, you'll see a lot of the places reimagined onboard.
Looking at the Regent Suite, there’s some specific things in that particular space that will be different from the other ships. And then you'll have a lot of the great levels of cuisine that we're known for that will be onboard — everything from Prime 7 to Chartreuse and Compass Rose, which is the largest specialty restaurant at sea.
What message do you have for travel partners looking to sell luxury cruise travel right now?
Our travel partners serve a really critical role, not just for Regent Seven Seas Cruises, but the entire travel industry. We want to make it easy for travel partners to sell our brand.
Our travel partners serve a really critical role, not just for Regent Seven Seas Cruises, but the entire travel industry.
First, our truly unrivaled experience [allows] our partners to feel confident that their clients are going to have a magnificent experience and want to come back time and time again.
Second, we offer the best value in luxury cruising with our all-inclusive luxury experience. When you look at the competitive subset, many will claim inclusivity, but Regent’s really the only luxury cruise line to offer everything. Unlimited shore excursions in every port, roundtrip airfare, gourmet cuisine and fine wine, valet laundry — they’re all included.
One of the things that we did is create a simple and easy way to show the true value comparison versus other luxury and premium cruise lines. And we took it a step further to show it by major markets.
At the end of the day, [our fare] is sometimes [in line with or] even less than some of the premium lines or other luxury lines, because you'll have to pay for all of these different amenities on other cruises that aren't as inclusive as we are.
So, this is a great tool for our partners to use [available in the Travel Partner Center], and we're always looking for new tools to educate and support our partners as needed.
We've invested heavily in global research, which maps our psychographic and behavioral factors. And we use qualitative and quantitative data points to really identify distinct clusters of customer segments. This industry-leading research is going to let our travel partners fast-track their growth in the luxury space, which in turn will help them earn commissions [with us].
Also, we’re going to be launching a new webinar series to assist our partners with growing their Regent business. We're going to share some more information about that in the coming months, so stay tuned.
