Thinking about a cruise? Online discounts are here!
The last holdout from the online price wars, the cruise business, is finally succumbing with one lucky traveler managing to bid on a 17-day cruise from Fort Lauderdale to Italy for $19 (plus taxes & fees) on skyauction.com. Hmm, shouldn't this site be seaauction.com? I'm assuming the combination of a weak economy and that Norfolk virus epidemic on every second cruise ship (or so it seemed for a while) hasn't been good for business! :)
This Wall Street Journal story (subscription required) confirms what the head of one of the major cruise companies was telling me in LA a couple of months back.
[O]nly 2.7% of cruises will be booked online this year, up from 1.3% two years ago. In contrast, about 25% of airline tickets are now booked online, according to Jupiter Research.
Now, however, Priceline.com (priceline.com1), Travelocity.com (travelocity.com2) and Icruise.com (icruise.com3) are moving aggressively to challenge the conventional wisdom that people who book cruises can't figure all this out on their own. In addition, the cruise industry, because of the increasing likelihood of war, is looking for ways to fill its berths. The result is a new level of discounting on top of the industry's recent price-cutting.