Cruise Line Traffic Up 15.6% in May, Heading Into Summer Season

Small but fast-growing Virgin has more than doubled its traffic in a year, while Celebrity is up 36.8% and Norwegian is up 33%

Web traffic increased for all the leading cruise lines in May, with Virgin, Celebrity, and Norwegian showing particularly big gains.

Key takeaways

• Virgin Voyages is a relatively new entrant to the industry, but its remarkable growth story continued in May, with 104.8% year-over-year traffic growth. Compared with April, Virgin’s traffic was up 20%. Virgin attracted 2.2 million visits in May, according to Similarweb estimates.
• Celebrity drew 5 million visits, up 36.8% year-over-year. Celebrity is a Royal Caribbean brand, and Royal Caribbean itself attracted 13.6 million visits, up 4.5% year-over-year.
• Carnival, the biggest brand in cruising, got 14.4 million visits, up 5.9% year-over-year.
• Norwegian Cruise Lines attracted 8.9 million visits, up 33%.
• Branded search, an indicator of brand recognition because it reflects consumers “asking for a company by name,” was up compared with early last summer by 56% for Virgin Voyages, 26.8% for Norwegian, and 23.6% for Celebrity – the same three that gained the most in traffic on a percentage basis.
• Aggregated traffic for all the brands covered in this report showed a 15.6% year-over-year increase, reflecting a strong interest in cruising in general.

Cruise Lines Saw Across-the-Board Growth

Traffic was up for everyone, even if it was up more for a few brands, on a year-over-year basis.

These brands also saw month-over-month growth with the approach of summer, with the exception of the Princess website (part of the Carnival Cruise Lines company), with traffic down a fraction of a percent.

Norwegian had the biggest gain in share of traffic

In the market defined by this competitive set, Norwegian showed the biggest gain in share of traffic, up 2.1 percentage points. Virgin gained 1.7 points and Celebrity gained 1.4. The Royal Caribbean brand was down 2.5 points, although the economic impact should be offset somewhat by Celebrity’s performance. Carnival’s share of traffic was down 2.3 points.

Carnival and Royal Caribbean draw nearly as much traffic as all the other competitors combined, which is why gains by any of the other brands tend to come at their expense. That makes Norwegian the biggest competitor to have also seen big gains in May.

Strong branded search for those gaining traffic

One explanation for which cruise lines made the greatest gains is increased brand awareness as reflected in branded search. SEO professionals work to win traffic for other phrases like “Bahamas cruise” and “best cruise deals,” but if you worked at Royal Caribbean you would treasure those who enter “royal caribbean” or any variation of your company name into a search engine, meaning consumers “ask for us by name.”

Unfortunately for both Carnival and Royal Caribbean, those searches have been on the decline over the last year, while Virgin, Celebrity, and Norwegian enjoyed branded search increases. Over the period covered in the chart below, branded search was down 28.2% for Carnival and 23.3% for Celebrity.

Increased branded search likely reflects the success of television advertising and other marketing campaigns. The majority of the search activity associated with these companies is organic search, not paid search advertising. Royal Caribbean had the highest percentage of paid search in May.

% paid search, May 2023

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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Image by Gaye Clifford 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".