If you live in the UK, there are two cruise travel agents we recommend, Cruise Deals from Cruise VIP and Cruise Holidays from Jetline Cruise.
An announcement by Drabdesign in their Cruises section states that they are now in the process of optimizing websites for Cruise Holidays specialist Cruise VIP a London based cruise travel agent. More to follow…
Royal Caribbean Cruise is a cruise website dedicated to Royal Caribbean International, the main rival to Carnival Corporations many Cruise Lines. This cruising website is new and not complete. It appears to have two sections, one about Royal Caribbean, the other a news section for Royal Caribbean. Some interesting information can be found including a page dedicated to the Independence of the Seas, a new Freedom class ship, due to sail from Southampton in 2008 when built.
The Cruise is a new site with feeds from other cruise related sites, thereby having updated news from all the main cruise lines as it happens.
Cunard Cruise Lines is a cruise website dedicated to the Cunard Line and is still in development. It consists of a home page, optimized for the term Cunard Cruise Lines, with links to other pages (still in development) for each of the ships. They are nicely set out, yet need to be finished. From the cruising website home page a link to a news blog exists. This only has a few articles, though each are relevant to the theme of the site, i.e. Cunard Cruise Lines.
Cruises Cruise Lines is a cruise website looking at all cruise lines. It has recently been updated and uses the Serendipity blogging software. Nice design, though lacking in content.
Cruisegle Cruise Search is new and designed as a home page on the Google format. It is also a cruise resource page offering links to the top cruise sites on the web. The author also offers the chance to have your own home page created for free. Love it!
A new Cruise Website or rather Cruising Website seems to appear daily. This is as a result of Cruising being one of the fastest growing industries. How can you tell? Well look at the order books. There are numerous ships on order and all are getting bigger. The biggest, due at the end of 2008, is code named Project Genesis and will give Royal Caribbean a ship capable of carrying 5,400 passengers. Even the luxury cruise lines are making bigger ships. Silversea for instance have ordered two ultra luxury 540 passenger ships, large by luxury standards.
As is the case with any industry, once successful, numerous websites are generated to try and serve the need of that industry. This is also the case with the cruise website. Not all the cruise lines offer the best cruising website experience and this one will be looking at only a few, privately run ones, that are not the best, by far, but are growing and it will be interesting to see them develop. Each cruise website will be reviewed separately however as they are privately run, I will only be able to update when they update their cruising websites, so please be patient