Speaking at the Clia Cruise Forum, Josh Weinstein described Brexit as “a train wreck I can’t stop watching”.
He said current demand was "going well" but expressed his concerns if the situation continued to roll on.
"The longer this indecisiveness goes on, the longer the unknown goes on, the more likely there will be a pause,” he told delegates.
“There won’t be a pause because people think the world is going to end but because it’s just as simple as consumers saying: ‘I don’t want to deal with the hassle. Am I going to be able to go to Europe? Will it be a hassle at the border? I don’t want to deal with it’.”
Weinstein said Carnival UK was currently “mitigating the hell out of everything” surrounding Brexit and the company was “continuing to refine" its plans as "the potential of a hard Brexit looms larger and larger".
To help consumer confidence, P&O Cruises today launched its own “Brexit promise” to guests, which Weinstein said would make holidaymakers “know everything is ok”.
“It’s about taking a step back and realising that if you’re a Brit, who wants to go on P&O Cruises, you can go all over the world – including Europe – you can leave from the UK without using an airport, you can pay pounds for your ticket and pay pounds onboard and for excursions.
“We want to give guests and potential guests an understanding that life is going to go on.
“We’ve been through a recession and we all thought the world was going to fall apart but it didn’t and the amazing thing is that people still need to go away and still want to go on holiday. Cruise lines didn’t go out of business during the recession when lots of other businesses did.”
Also tackling the topic of Brexit, Clia UK and Ireland chair Tony Roberts urged the cruise sector to come together to “inspire people to choose cruise” amid the uncertainty.
“There is going to be continued uncertainty over the coming months [and] consumer confidence is taking a bit of a dip,” he said. “Whatever happens over the next 3-5 months and beyond that our job as an industry is to continue to inspire people to choose a cruise holiday.”
Roberts added that “despite challenges ahead”, he believed the industry was in “a very strong forward booking position” going into the 2019 wave booking period.
