There is nothing “small” about small-ship line Windstar Cruises entering its busiest period of fleet renewal in decades, says managing director of global commercial Helen Beck.
With a new-build yacht already sailing, a converted sister ship due to join before Christmas, and a multi-million-dollar refurbishment of its original Wind Class trio nearing completion, the former Royal Caribbean Line executive is merely scratching the surface of the changes afoot, just 18 months into her new role.
Speaking with Travel Weekly Australia after her appearance at Cruise360 Australasia, Beck said 224-passenger all-suite yacht Star Seeker had joined the fleet in December – the brand’s first new-build in almost 40 years and the first of two sister ships that will take Windstar to eight yachts in total.
“A brand-new build, the first new build for us in – is it nearly 40 years? – for a very long time,” Beck said, of the yacht built in Portugal.
Sister ship Star Explorer is taking a different route into the fleet. Rather than a new-build, she is a five-year-old former Quark Expeditions ship, the 2019 build World Explorer, being converted to the same standard as Star Seeker ahead of a December shakedown sailing from Lisbon to Málaga and an official christening in June 2027.
“Five, six years – nowadays that’s, you know, newborn almost, very, very young (for a ship),” Beck said. Once Star Explorer enters service, that will make eight ships, Beck said.
“We’ll have three sailing yachts and five motor yachts,” she said.
Setting Sails refurb wraps next year
The new tonnage is running alongside a separate refurbishment of Windstar’s older Wind Class ships, under a program the line calls Setting Sails.
“It was a multi-million-dollar investment into upgrading the ships – all of the public areas, all of the rooms, all of the kit and caboodle that goes on at dry dock,” Beck said.
Two ships remain on the program. Wind Surf is due to complete its final phase – updated staterooms – in November, while Wind Spirit closes out Setting Sails in dry dock in February, bringing the multi-year program to an end.
“We’ve still got two into next year,” Beck said. “Wind Surf has got her last phase, the rooms being updated, coming up in November … then Wind Spirit, that’s the last of the Setting Sail program. She’s in dry dock in February.”
Beck said she was impressed by the fleet’s when she first sailed with the line last year.
“I was pleasantly surprised when I went on board my first ship, Star Legend, in June of last year, at how beautifully maintained and looked after it was, particularly on the Star Class. The suites, absolutely beautiful,” she said.
What does “small ship” mean?
The investment in fleet is feeding directly into how Windstar wants to be understood in market, particularly one as valuable as Australian and New Zealand to a lesser extent. Beck described the brand’s positioning simply as “casual luxury”, built around choice rather than formality.
“It’s choice. We offer choice,” she said. “We’re small ships, but we offer different dining experiences – three or even four different restaurants on each ship. We have 24-hour room service, we do deck barbecues, we open up the back of the ship as the marina.”
Much as she did on her Cruise60 panel, Beck also push back on the “small ship” label, arguing it fails to distinguish between vessels ranging from 30 to 1,000 berths, equating a 1,000-berth ship to roughly 500 hotel rooms at double occupancy.
“You would never say a 500-bedroomed hotel was small, ever,” she declared.
Beyond the ships themselves, Windstar has also been expanding its Destination Discovery program – private, after-hours shore experiences in ports the line already visits, including an out-of-hours Tower of London visit, an evening at Ephesus, a circumnavigation-linked event in Iceland and a newly announced addition in Livorno. Travel Weekly will look at that program in more detail in a future article.
Why Australia punches above its weight
Beck said Australia and New Zealand remained a priority market despite representing a small slice of Windstar’s global revenue, pointing to per-capita cruising rates, a preference for back-to-back sailings, fly-cruise habits and longer stays.
“We’re still, financially, a small part of the market, but we’re a key part of the market because you punch above your weight,” she said.
Tahiti is doing much of the work getting Windstar onto Australian advisors’ radar, Beck said, with roughly half of Australian bookings already tied to the destination ahead of a second yacht being based there from March next year.
“That gives us that puts us on the radar of the majority of the Australian and New Zealand travel community, because we’re close to home in that sense,” she said. “That’s a tick.”
From there, Beck said the pitch to advisors becomes about breadth rather than size.
“We’ve only got eight ships, but look where we sail: two in Tahiti … then between those six, we’re in Alaska, we’re in Costa Rica, we come down the New England coast, we’re in Northern Europe, we’re in the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands, the Greek Islands, we’re in Asia, we’re in Japan,” she said. “It’s not that we’ve got the world covered, because we haven’t, but you can kind of find us in most places that your clients are looking to travel to.”
Booking behaviour is another point of difference Beck flags for advisors, with Australia’s booking window running on a different cycle to the UK and US, and local clients often paying a premium over other source markets.
“We’ve got the Australians who book a slightly different way, but they’ll pay a bit more,” she said. “We need to make sure we’ve got occupancy, we’ve got inventory available for them to book into when they come into their booking window.”
That behaviour is part of why Windstar created Beck’s global role in the first place, using a spread of source markets to manage risk when demand shifts unexpectedly.
“This is a new position that was created in the company to give focus on international markets, to de-risk, so that you’ve got other markets you can go to that book differently,” she said.
On the ground, Beck said trade relationships still come down to personal contact – advisors wanting to see the people behind the brand, not just the ships.
From growth to yield
With the fleet soon to reach its full complement, Beck said the commercial focus is shifting from expansion to yield – working out how pricing, booking windows and source markets interact once new-ship growth slows.
“Once we’re on sale with our eight ships, for us now, it’s maximising yield,” she said. “We’re starting to get a bit more sophisticated in looking at our data – who’s paying what, when, and which markets. Are we leaving some money on the table?”
Australia is central to that equation. About 50 per cent of Australian bookings already relate to Tahiti and the South Pacific, a region set to gain a second Windstar yacht once Star Explorer is in service – itself part of the broader case Beck is making for reclassifying what a “small ship” line can offer.
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