CASE STUDY
1
Strategic Management for Tourism
The Fun Ship Experience at Carnival Lines
Ekrem GÜLAY
2008435025
SUMMARY OF THE CASE
At the beginning of case study, writer mentioned about early time of Carnival Cruise. Carnival has got more passenger capacity than any other cruise line in the world. The article mentioned about facilities of ships like; balcony, lounges, bars, etc. Also the article demonstrates some economical data which is daily cruise fares and annually net incomes. At the first paragraph, it gives that how the Fun Ship born?
In the part of “The Competitive Structure of the Cruise Industry”, the article focused on history of cruise industry which was started 1960s. In 1970, only 500,000 people took a cruise. The cruise was an expensive, formal and relatively length vocation – 7 to 14 days. So that reason, cruise has limited appeal. After starting “The Love Boat” TV series in 1977, the cruise industry had grown more than 9 million passengers in 2004 and annually growth rate 8.2 percent. In that part, the article explained competition structure in the cruise industry which changed dramatically around the turn of the 21s century. It says that the cruise market in the 1970s and 1980s was served by 30 brands; by 2005 only 10 brands owned by three corporations controlled 90 percent of the market.
Carnival Corp emerged as the largest cruise company in the world and its powerful competitor is Royal Caribbean International (RCI). The two companies had waged a marketing war for years. During this marketing war, each company tried to get advantage. As a result of competition, each company upgrade their hardware which effected to create bigger ships with more passenger capacity. Also each company added new facilitates to the ships like; basketball courts, mini golf courts, ice-skating and rock-climbing wall. Carnival continued to emphasize its Fun Ship positioning strategy, while RCI attempted to position as a more sophisticated...