Thursday March 20

It is the Thursday before a busy weekend of cruise - with the Mail Newspapers Cruise Show in London appealing to the great British public to take their first cruise holiday - and an AmaWaterways Showcase in Amsterdam - but before we launch into next week, here is a review of the last.

The big news from Wednesday was the Budget and for our industry the change to APD to the Caribbean - warmly welcomed by the travel industry - will it have a big impact on fly-cruising to the Caribbean?  Time will tell.  But here is a review of the tax cut from Travel Weekly: read here

Staying with Travel Weekly, the news yesterday was of a Royal Visit by HRH Duke of Edinburgh to Queen Mary 2 to celebrate her 10th Anniversary - the visit will take place in May: read here

It was great to see the friendly face of Kathryn Beadle in TTG talking about her first years in the cruise industry - she talks about 'doing things differently' and for example how programmes like BBC Stargazing Live influenced potential customers.  Read here.

Interestingly this week the Port of Barcelona recorded record cruise guests using the port in winter months.  It comes of course as Norwegian Cruise Line have recently announced that Norwegian Epic will be based in Europe for the first time year round next year.  Could we see huge growth in Med winter cruising?  Read here

Back closer to home we saw figures released from Cruise Britain telling us that for the first time more than a million people will start their cruise holiday from a UK port: read here

And CLIA also announced cruise statistics across Europe - yet another record year for the industry: read here

Meanwhile, have you read our March Informer yet?  It is packed full of CLIA news: read here

We look forward to a great cruise week ahead!