Thursday August 14th 2014

Another exciting week for the industry as Quantum of the Seas is 'floated out' in Germany ahead of its sea-trials in September.  She is an impressive ship (over 167,000 GRT and over 4,100 guests), with a light-blue hull  - and will feature some ground-breaking new technology.  Read the piece from the Daily Mail here.

Meanwhile, Cunard has announced a big refurbishment for Queen Victoria in January.  The transformation includes public spaces, staterooms and new 'Scrubber' technology.  Read more here.  She will cancel some sailings to make the refurbishment happen.

Staying with Cunard - great to hear that they will be hosting a special exhibition for Lusitania onboard Queen Victoria in May - read more here.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the 'Cool Cruises' survey from Travel Weekly - who did travel agent vote as their favourites?  You can find out through their special supplement here.

In the world of luxury cruise there was the big announcement from Hapag Lloyd this week - they ill be using The Cruise Line to manage their marketing and sales in association with existing Hapag Lloyd sales representative Mike Flannigan: read more here.

In other news - it was great to see three cruise people make the TTG Top Travel Tweeters list for 2014 - Jo Rzymowska (Celebrity Cruises and CLIA Chair), Giles Hawke (MSC Cruises) and our very own Andy Harmer (CLIA) - well done all 3, and indeed the wider 25.  See the list here.

Princess Cruises continues to make the headlines - this week was the announcement about Regal Princess that the ship will be christened by some of the original cast of US hit series The Love Boat: read here.

It is worth checking out last week's TTG (page 30, Aug 7) for details of a new wave of cruise graduates coming out of Southampton (with the support of CLIA of course): read here

It is also worth checking out this week's Travel Weekly (page 22) for some great comment by two members of the CLIA Travel Agent Advisory Council - Simone (IGLU) and Phil (Cruise Village) on cruise training.  Check out the digital edition here.

Until next week!