Dollar for Dollar, Ships vs. Yachts
There’s a heck of a lot of buzz on the Internet right now about the new 951-foot-long cruise ship Ventura, which P&O Cruise Lines launched this weekend in England–proudly hailing her as “the largest superliner ever built for the British market.” This is a whopper of a cruise ship, taking more than 3,000 passengers at a time. She’s currently on her maiden voyage in the Mediterranean.
A review of the new ship in London’s Sunday Times caught my attention, not because of all the activities and food it describes as being available onboard, but because at the end of the story, the writer quotes the price for a family of four to take a two-week cruise: 8,060 pounds, or the equivalent of $16,000 at today’s conversion rate.
I immediately hopped over to the website of CharterWave sponsor Virgin Island Sailing, which I know to have a regularly updated list of crewed yacht prices in the Virgin Islands–and where, just as I expected, I found several private charter yachts that would cost a family of four the exact same amount of money for a two-week vacation. If two families wanted to get together and double the overall budget to $32,000 for two weeks, there are a good number of well-kept charter yachts they could enjoy a vacation onboard.
It never ceases to amaze me that people would choose to cram their family onto a floating city at sea when they could relax onboard their own private yacht (with a captain and a chef!) for nary an extra cent.
I continually chalk such decisions up to ignorance–that people simply don’t know they have another,similarly priced option in yacht charter. I plan to keep pounding that message home here on CharterWave, like a person throwing a defiant pebble into the ocean of cruise ship media coverage.