CruiseCompete, a cruise booking website, saw a 40 percent increase in its 2021 cruise bookings compared to 2019. These numbers aren’t just people rebooking canceled cruises, as might be expected, but eager travelers booking new sailings. Only 11 percent of the bookings are made by people whose trips were canceled in 2020, Heidi M. Allison, president of CruiseCompete told the Los Angeles Times.
According to Swiss bank UBS, booking volume for 2021 was even up by nine percent in the past 30 days, compared to the same period last year, with a high volume of bookings for Asia and Alaska.
Encouragingly, the coronavirus doesn’t seem to have dissuaded people from traveling in the future. An online poll conducted by Cruise Critic found that 75 percent of the 4,600 surveyed plan on continuing to cruise once the crisis is over, with some even saying they plan to do so more frequently than before. 