On Southampton’s concrete docks under a sky heavy with drizzle, tourists — most of them middle aged — crane their necks at the horizon. In the slate-grey river beside them towers a cruise ship that will carry them to the Solent strait and the blue waters of the Caribbean beyond.
The age of the cruise crowd illustrates a problem that Arnold Donald of Carnival Cruises is grappling with 4,000 miles away in his office in sunny Miami, Florida. The chief executive of the world’s largest cruise company not only has to lead a business that carries 11m passengers on its ships every year. He also has to secure its profitable future against a strong, demographic challenge.
Many within the tourism industry are sceptical about whether cruise companies have a future with younger generations of travellers. Cruising, says one executive at Carnival speaking on condition of anonymity, is for “the newly-weds, the nearly-deads and no one in between”.