Squawk Box

March 26, 2006

Squawk_box Do you get up early? Well if you don’t set your TiVo to catch the beginning of Squawk Box on Monday moring around 6:10 am. I have been booked to talk about the crisis facing the cruise industry.

Here is a quick preview of what we’ll be discussing. I’ll post more after the segment.

Ship fires, stomach viruses, husbands overboard and high fuel costs. Can the high-flying cruise industry survive recent setbacks and return to the high seas and mega profits?

With the raft of recent negative PR stories how should the industry and its two major players Carnival and Royal Caribbean respond?

The best thing for Carnival is to do nothing. No advertising, no promotion. The best way to solve a PR crisis is give people time to forget about it. Running advertising saying our ships are clean and we put out all cigarettes will not help people feel safer about cruising. It will only reinforce the negative ideas in the mind. When the reader sees an ad like that, he or she thinks Carnival must really be worried, and there must really be a problem if they are paying millions of dollars on advertising trying to convince me otherwise.