Seatrade Cruise Global 2025 Conference Reviewed: Dropping Anchor Or Plain Sailing? Or Something In Between? By Adrian Pittaway, Owner & CEO Cruise Retail Academy
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Sailing Forward or Back – 40 years of Seatrade Cruise Global. But where next for the cruise retail sector?
Seatrade Cruise Global 2025 in Miami marked a significant moment for the cruise industry, celebrating its 40th anniversary. The event brought together over 10,000 attendees, 600 exhibiting companies, and representatives from over 80 cruise line brands. Key announcements included new ship launches, port development plans, and organizational updates. Included this year was an expanded Retail Days event held over 2 days. The event’s strong framework, and attracting important participants made it another successful and optimistic gathering for the cruise industry, despite the many storm clouds on the horizon.
So, let’s break down what actually happened into the good, the bad and the indifferent!
THE GOOD
In my opinion, the most inspiring part of Seatrade was Tomorrow’s Talent Today sessions on the first day. Focusing on crew, training, recruitment and celebrating the next generation of cruise industry leaders. It’s great to see students invited to learn more, and there is so much scope for expansion. Lots of informative panels with key discussions on use of technology, innovations in using AI and how the industry must evolve. More of this next year please! I was delighted to join in one of these sessions and talk through how we at Cruise Retail Academy are leveraging new thinking, AI technology and innovation in developing integrated recruitment and training for the cruise retail sector.
Secondly, it was great to see an expanded visibility for retail at Seatrade. 2 days with 7 different sessions is the greatest presence that retailers have had in the conference, and this is only to be celebrated. The format shows great promise, was well attended by the main actors in our sector and was very well moderated by Dermot Davitt. It shows that retail can be a significant part of the agenda.
THE BAD
Whilst it is the ongoing ‘elephant in the room’, I have to say that a real lack of data was once again evident in the retail sessions. Nearly all the panelists had to talk in sweeping theoretical answers and, despite Dermot’s best efforts to drill into the detail, it simply is not available publicly. In such a competitive marketplace, there is such a lack of transparency, and therefore any interested company trying to understand the scale, scope and potential of cruise retail would have left Seatrade disappointed and without the insight they paid a lot to try to learn.
This has been an industry problem now for many years, and was glaringly obvious at this expanded event. It seems truly ironic when many panelists sit on the stage and say ‘we have the data, so we understand’. Quantity has got to equal quality at some point in our industry.
THE INDIFFERENT
For all the talk of innovation at Seatrade, it does seem that ‘familiar’ wins when it comes to this event. Too many panels are simply copy / paste of previous years and we see the same faces talking the same stories many times. After 40 years of success, you can understand why, but I think it’s also important to move it forward. Having attended many sessions, there were some amazing panellists and inspiring new voices in a heavyweight line-up. In my opinion, there has to be a continued effort to get more focus on giving these new voices a greater presence with more bite to showcase the talent that is coming through!
So what other suggestions do I think could help improve Seatrade, and specifically the retail part of it?
Firstly, connect Tomorrow’s Talent Today to retail. We are a people business, and therefore we need to ensure that the great subjects we covered in talking about people are connected to the retail part of the conference. Very few people attending on Monday’s sessions were there on Tuesday and it is a shame to see this slight disconnect.
Secondly, understand how we can share data and information whilst respecting the commercial sensitivities of the industry. We must work harder in cruise retail to find a neutral way to collect the key data and then share it to the businesses who desperately need it. It is not cheap to come to these retail days, so there has to be some value added given to the new audience who we need to attract, or it will simply become an echo chamber for the people who already understand the data.
Thirdly, more networking for retailers. Interestingly, in my view, the greatest discussions happened outside of the conference rooms, but there needed to be more room for networking. Being in such a tight constraint with other Seatrade sessions sharing the same rooms meant that many great conversations were stopped early. It would be good to have a dedicated retail reception/breakout to allow the right people to connect with one another!
I think that the expansion of retail at Seatrade is a good thing for our industry. It allows further opportunity to share our complicated corner of cruise in a well-run, well attended event. We are looking forward to supporting as best as we can to help get cruise retail better known and understood by the right people!
