Wave Season: Cruise Line Web Traffic Up 11% in Q1

During “wave season” for cruise travel sales, which overlaps with the first quarter, traffic to major cruise line websites was up 11% compared with the same period last year, according to Similarweb estimates. That means consumer interest is strong, giving the cruise lines many opportunities to win bookings.

Fastest Growing Brands

The brands with the biggest year-over-year (YoY) percentage growth were the MSC Cruises USA (+32.9%) and Holland America (+26%). 

Royal Caribbean + Celebrity up 11% YoY

Royal Caribbean (royalcaribbean.com) attracted the most traffic of any cruise brand, 16.9 million visits for the quarter, up 14% YoY. Royal Caribbean owns Celebrity (celebritycruises.com), and for the two combined traffic was up 11% YoY.

Traffic to Carnival Cruise Lines flagship website, carnival.com, was flat, but traffic was up to princess.com (+11%) and hollandamerica.com (+26%). For those three brands combined traffic was up 7% YoY.

Growth by challenger brands

MSC Cruises, a fast-growing challenger brand, saw a 21.4% YoY gain across three websites (msccruisesusa.com, msccruises.com, and msccrociere.it), with the US website showing the strongest gain, up 33% YoY for the quarter.

Virgin Voyages, the smallest of the cruise brands Similarweb has been tracking, saw web traffic growth of 20%, attracting 2.7 million visits worldwide.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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Image by Ed Judkins from Pixabay

by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".