With Louis Cruise Lines having now raised the Greek flag over eight of its cruise ships, this Greek-Cypriot-owned company has actually become the largest employer of Greek merchant seafarers. Louis now owns thirteen cruise ships, of which it operates seven for its own account and four for Thomson Cruises while its two recent purchases still operate for Norwegian Cruise Line. 
The Greeks, with all the islands of the Aegean, have always been an important part of passenger shipping. The Goulandris-owned Greek Line, founded in 1939, introduced the first Greek newbuilding, Olympia, in 1953, and lasted until a fuel crisis put the line out of business in 1975. Olympia still sails today, as Regal Empress on short cruises from Port Everglades to the Bahamas. But in the meantime the face of Greek cruise shipping has changed completely.
The Rise, Demise and Rise Again of Greek Cruising
The Greeks are probably best known for having introduced modern cruising to the Mediterranean in the 1950s. But of the family names involved – Potamianos, Kavounides, Efthymiades, Nomikos, Typaldos, Chandris, Panagopoulis – only one is still active today.
Although Celebrity Cruises sprung from the Chandris family, who sold the line to Royal Caribbean in 1997, its ships had never flown the Greek flag. They still today carry the letter X for "chi" and most still have Greek masters and officers.
That sale was not a loss to Greek shipping – the real demise came about in 2004, when not one but two Greek-owned cruise lines, Festival Cruises, with offices in Piraeus and Genoa, and Piraeus-based Royal Olympic Cruises, went out of business. Both had built new ships for the trade and it was these that many thought brought them into financial difficulty. After having ships arrested at different ports around the world, both disappeared within a few months.
Things could have been different. Carnival Corporation had taken control of Epirotiki Lines in 1994, but then withdrew when Epirotiki and Sun Lines agreed to merge into Royal Olympic in 1995. Louis Cruise Lines then took a stake in Royal Olympic in 1999 but later walked away. In May 2000, meanwhile, P&O agreed to buy Festival Cruises for $400 million, but it abandoned this plan in March 2001 after a fall in its stock price as P&O Cruises demerged from P&O. Either of these outcomes would have resulted in their absorption into an international conglomerate, the same one today as it turns out. As Festival and Royal Olympic went out of business their ships were acquired by other operators.
Thereafter, Golden Sun Cruises, today operating as Monarch Classic Cruises, and Larnaka-based Louis Cruise Lines stepped into the breach, especially in the local cruise market from Piraeus. Golden Sun was Greek but Louis Cruise Lines, which had once owned Royal Olympic together with the Potamianos family, were Greek-Cypriot. Their own answer was to form Louis Hellenic Cruises in March 2005, and transfer ships into the Greek flag to operate cruises not only from Piraeus but also from Genoa, where it opened a branch office. Assisting this move into Greek flag was George Stathopoulos, a Greek-born cruise executive who had previously worked for all of Festival, Celebrity and Royal Olympic.
Louis Cruise Lines
Louis Cruise Lines itself is a subsidiary of the Cyprus-based tourism and travel group Louis Group PLC, founded in 1935. It purchased its first ship in 1985 and today operates under the Louis Cruise Lines name. Of the thirteen ships it owns today, it operates seven under its own name, on 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 16-day cruises, and four under charter to Thomson Cruises.
Four Greek-flag ships, the 790-lower-berth Aegean Pearl, 1,050-berth Aquamarine, 728-berth Orient Queen and 960-berth Cristal, its newest, all operate from Piraeus, while from the Cypriot port of Limassol it operates the Greek-flag 508-passenger Ivory and the 576-berth Marshall Islands-registered Sapphire. The Greek-flag Orient Queen and the 748-berth Cypriot-flag Coral meanwhile offer departures from both Genoa and Marseilles.
Two more Greek-flag ships, the 486-berth Calypso and the 990-berth Emerald, presently operate for Thomson Cruises, as do the Cypriot-registered 1,450-berth Thomson Destiny and 1,254-berth Thomson Spirit. Thomson Majesty, meanwhile, sister ship to the Thomson Spirit, is owned by Holland America and managed for Thomson by Columbia Ship Management of Limassol. Louis’s own ship management company, Louis Shipmanagement Ltd, being based in Athens, further cements its Greek link.
Sale & Purchase
As mentioned in this column on April 28, Louis have recently acquired the 1,750-berth Norwegian Dream and 1,460-berth Norwegian Majesty from NCL and will charter them back until November 2008 and December 2009, respectively. The Dream will be the first to come free and although her future deployment has not yet been announced, the Emerald is doing her last season for Thomson, so she may well find employment there. With the acquisition of these ships, Louis has decided to retire two of its older ships.
After 22 years carrying 1.3 million passengers from Limassol to the Eastern Mediterranean, Louis’s flagship Princesa Marissa (628 lower berths), its first acquisition, is now to be sold as fleet renewal goes ahead. Princesa Marissa was named after the chairman’s daughter and played a fundamental role in placing Cyprus on the cruising map, while Louis Cruise Lines slowly grew to be the fifth largest cruise operator in the world. Louis is also disposing of the 600-berth Serenade, once well-known in the French market as Mermoz.
Monarch Classic Cruises
Back in Piraeus, Monarch Classic Cruises, formed by Andreas Potamianos and the Kollakis Group (Majestic International Cruises) in 2006, now operates two 800-passenger Portuguese-registered ships, Blue Monarch and Ocean Countess, both formerly Royal Olympic ships, in the 3-, 4-, 7 and 14-day cruise market from Piraeus.
As much of Monarch’s business comes from America, it has joined the US-based Niche Cruise Marketing Alliance and opened an office in New York that offers fixed fares in US dollars to American travellers.
Majestic International also own the Portuguese-registered Ocean Majesty, which have been operating in the UK charter market. The irony here is that while Louis now has eight Greek-flag ships, its chief competitor from Piraeus now operates under Portuguese flag.
Other Greeks
Some other Greeks also continue in the business of owning cruise ships while chartering them out to other operators, three of these in Germany. Leonardo Shipping of Piraeus owns the 780-berth Mona Lisa, which is now chartered to Lord Nelson Seereisen of Erkelenz, near Cologne, while Athens-based Enterprises Shipping & Trading has the 650-berth Delphin Voyager on to Delphin Kreuzfahrten of Offenbach. And this spring, Global Cruise Lines of Piraeus acquired Orient Line’s 848-berth Marco Polo, which now operates under charter to Transocean Tours of Bremen.
Another Greek-Cypriot, Stelios Haji-Iouannu, whose father owned the Piraeus-based Troodos Shipping Co Ltd, and who formed his own Athens-based Stelmar Shipping in 1992, founded easyJet in 1995. Last month, his easyCruise put into service his second cruise ship, the 600-passenger Maltese-flag EasyCruise Life, now cruising the Greek Islands. Although EasyCruise Life was refitted in Greece, an earlier agreement between EasyCruise and Louis to build four new mid-size cruise ships in a Greek shipyard has fallen into abeyance.
One shipowner who is Greek is George Potamianos, a relative of the Piraeus family who moved from Greece to Lisbon in 1985 and now heads up Classic International Cruises. This company operates five cruise ships (two of which were once the Greek-owned Danae and Daphne) under Portuguese flag. Although run from Lisbon, the head company, Arcalia Shipping Co Ltd, is still based in Cyprus.
The Future?
With a change in the Greek coasting regulations and in Greek manning laws, the Greek flag has all of a sudden become more attractive to at least one operator.
Whereas Festival did not use the Greek flag at all, Royal Olympic did but had looked at putting their newbuildings under Dutch flag. Obviously, Greece joining the European Union has caused some change here and given Greek maritime circles to have second thoughts about their previous cabotage laws, at least as far as cruise ships are concerned. But the number of Portuguese-flag cruise ships with Greek connections is also quite remarkable.
(Source: By Mark Tré – Cybercruises.com)
Archive for the ‘Imperial Majesty’ Category
Regal Empress is a ship that needs no introduction to most passenger ship lovers so I am not going to bother with a full description of her interiors or her history.
The ship herself is what is generally referred to as a market bottom-feeder – an older ship offering bare-bones budget cruises for mostly neophyte passengers who will hopefully enjoy their cruise experience enough to tempt a longer cruise on a more luxurious ship.
The little ship is the last of a breed of older cruise ships that popularized cruising in the 1970′s and 1980′s. A former tourist class transatlantic liner turned cruise ship with extremely limited facilities compared to what is offered on the mega ships of to-day,
but one that has a distinctive charm and character the modern ships can’t match, and ultimately, one that feeds her passengers well, houses them in relatively comfortable accommodation, and despite not having too many bells and whistles, still manages to give them a good time. And at the end of the day, what more can you ask for?
Unfortunately Regal Empress does get a bit of flack on internet sites, mainly from passengers who booked through a timeshare holiday scheme that perhaps promised them a lot more than what the ship is capable of delivering in terms of hardware. Imperial Majesty Cruises itself is not to blame for this – its marketing of the ship is fairly honest, and the passengers who book directly with it are the ones who usually leave the most satisfied.
So there I was a while standing on the pier at Port Everglades terminal 4. I’d just finished having an argument with a security guard who wouldn’t let me take a photo of the ship from the terminal parking lot. He said it was illegal to take photos of the terminal areas, and didn’t react to kindly when I suggested that if that was the case, he had better go onboard the ships and arrest allthe embarked passengers who were very evidently taking photos ofthose same terminal facilities, but from a better vantage point. You can’t win an argument against the dock fascists nowadays, so before the situation became more difficult, I went into the terminal and checked in.
The warm, glowing woodwork of the Regal Empress‘s embarkation foyer was a world away from the glitz and glamour of the modern cruise ship. A steward led me to my cabin, U90, a wonderful room with neoEdwardian wood panelling that was once part of the tourist class cardroom. The room had a large, very comfortable king-sized bed, and after 34 hours flying from Singapore, I lay down briefly just to try it out. Three hours later I was woken up by announcements for the boat drill.
That event completed, I went up on deck to watch us pull out of the port. Docked next door to Regal Empress at right angles was Princess’s giant Coral Princess. What is with those two Boeing 737 early generation engines welded onto her funnel? astern of her was SeaEscape’s diminutive gambling ship Island Adventure, while off on the other side of the port was Seven Seas Mariner. A quiet day in Port Everglades.
We set sail promptly at 5pm and headed off into a calm sea.
I took time to explore Regal Empress and take in her wonderful atmosphere. She oozes old-world charm for the most part. Imperial Majesty has done some refitting since taking her over from Regal Cruises in 2004, although not all has been in sympathy with the original décor.
The cinema is awful, the showroom bland, but all this is more than made up for by rooms such as the Commodore Club, the Mermaid Lounge, the dining room (which unfortunately inherited the chairs off the old Ocean Breeze), and all the wonderful foyers and staircases.
The ship’s indoor and outdoor promenade decks, and the tiered aft decks are truly delightful, my favourite spot being the small covered outdoor deck just aft of the showroom.
All in all the ship is in remarkably good condition for a 54-year old liner, and I found her maintenance to be of a much higher standard than when I last sailed in her under Regal Cruises ownership in 2000.
Knowing that jetlag would overcome me sooner rather than later in the evening, I booked the first sitting dinner. The passengers at my table were all Regal Empress veterans, one of whom has sailed in the ship over twenty times since Imperial put her on the short cruise run to the Bahamas. There were many regular passengers on board, so the dining room had lots of happy reunions between crew and passengers.
The ship’s crew are all long-serving veterans and work together as one big happy family, led by the very charming hotel manager, Alain Chabot, who has worked on board since her Commodore days. It is this kind of personal touch that is sadly missing on the big ships.
The cuisine was superb – on par, if not better than any of the mass market lines.
Entertainment is where the budget nature of Regal Empress‘s cruise shows itself. There was a troupe of excellent East-European singers and dancers for the shows, but the two-man show band backing them up lacked the necessary oomph, although the talent was there. Similarly, there is no longer a band in the Mermaid Lounge, which nowadays is used mainly for Karaoke. A Latin band and singer did perform in the evenings out by the swimming pool and were generally very well received. Unfortunately the pianist in the Commodore lounge had for the most part only the bar tender and waitress for an audience as the room was largely deserted during my cruise.
I rounded up the evening with a slice of pizza from the expansive midnight buffet and then went to catch up on lost sleep.
The next morning I was up early to watch our approach into Nassau, where we tied up in front of Carnival’s Fascination at around 9am. I spent the morning at the forward end of the promenade deck photographing the parade of arriving cruise ships, all of which performed a nice pirouette in front of Regal Empress before backing into their berths. First to arrive was Celebrity’s Millennium, followed then by Carnival’s Elation, which made a brief half-hour call to unload a medical emergency. The giant Explorer of the Seas arrived next, followed by the very attractive-looking Radiance of the Seas. Once Elation departed, the Sovereign of the Seas arrived, completing the list of visiting cruise ships for the day. Downtown Nassau, as you can well imagine, was a very tight squeeze with all he visiting cruise passengers. I took a brief stroll around the downtown area before spending the rest of the afternoon enjoying Regal Empress‘s lido deck. So many large ships were making my mind boggle.
We sailed from Nassau at 5pm, and once again I enjoyed a splendid meal in the dining room. The night passed far too quickly.
The next morning I was up early. After a quick breakfast on deck, I went up forward to watch our 9am arrival into Port Everglades. We passed closely by outbound Discovery Sun before entering the port. Visitors for the day included Costa Magica, Costa Mediterranea, Caribbean Princess, Carnival Liberty, Millennium, Radiance of the Seas and Westerdam. I was one of the first passengers off the ship as I had to rush down to Miami in time for lunch on board Oceania’s Regatta. I have sailed many times in Regatta‘s sistership Pacific Princess, and it was interesting to see how even more beautiful this class of ship can be when some money is splurged on them. Regatta is proof that it is little things that make the difference.
Summing up my Regal Empress experience, I have to say she is not a ship for cruise snobs who insist on a luxury ship. If you take her for what she is – a well-run 53-year old tourist class liner that is being used on a budget cruise service, then you will enjoy yourself immensely. I certainly did. Go sooner rather than later as this ship ould make that one way voyage to Alang for scrapping at the drop of a hat.
Reproduced with kind permission of Jonathan Boonzaier