The Cruise Market Is Changing. What Does That Mean For Cruise Agents?

A record 2.54 million people from the UK and Ireland took an ocean cruise in 2025, up from 2.4 million the previous year. The Mediterranean remained the most popular destination, while Caribbean passenger numbers increased by 12% year on year. Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) also expects eight new ships to enter service in 2026, taking its member fleet to 320. 

A lot of industries would love that growing demand, but this doesn’t automatically make a cruise agent’s job any easier.

If you combine this with the expanding platforms for research, it’s a whole new marketing challenge. Google is still important, but there’s social media, review platforms, creators, and AI tools, which all have a part to play in customer decision-making. 

That creates an interesting position for cruise agents, who remain central to how cruises are sold, described by CLIA as the principal distribution channel for cruise lines, and impacting the 79% of travellers who say they had a meaningful influence on their cruising decisions. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all cruise customer anymore. 

Although the average UK and Ireland cruiser was 54.6 in 2025, there was a 7% increase in children under 12 going on a cruise (very lucky kids). Globally, Millennials and Gen Z now account for approximately 36% of cruise passengers, and 31% of passengers in the last two years were new to cruise. 

So, yeah, it’s a very mixed bag.

Interest in different types of cruises has shifted, too. There’s been an increased interest from 19% to 36% in cruises of five days or less in 2025, particularly among 18-34-year-olds. Committing to four nights at sea definitely feels a lot less intimidating when you don’t yet know if you’re ready for cruising to become your entire personality. 

But the more important point for cruise agents is that these customers don’t all need the same thing. 

A first-time cruiser considering a short cruise from Southampton will need different information than a couple choosing their tenth Mediterranean cruise. A family has different concerns than an expedition cruiser. Someone comparing luxury lines won’t have the same wants or needs as someone looking for a budget school-holiday departure. 

Using our bespoke AI search optimisation tool, LLMLens, we looked at the type of queries a customer would genuinely ask, from budget last-minute searches, to family-booking queries, to premium comparisons. 

From our seed keywords and prompts, no single intent dominated. Budget and deal-hunting questions edged ahead, but first-timer and family queries weren’t far behind, which lines up with exactly the mixed picture above.

You could jump to the assumption that easier access to information would make travel agents redundant, but the cruise industry doesn’t seem to think so. 

CLIA’s latest research actually shows that travel advisors produce the majority of cruise bookings worldwide, with their knowledge and experience cited as a key reason they influence cruise decisions.

We’ve seen this play out in our AI visibility data too. Even for the same well-established agent, mentions swung from single digits on some questions to nine or more on others. AI doesn’t treat “cruise agent” as one ranking to win; it treats every question as its own decision. Cruise agents need to use their experience and expertise to answer these prompts and ultimately gain competitive advantage.

Which ship actually suits this customer? Is the itinerary right for the family? Does the package genuinely offer better value? What happens if travel plans change?

The marketing opportunity here is making sure that’s visible before somebody has already decided what to book and who to book it with.

Our own research into travel search behaviour shows that discovery is becoming increasingly multi-platform.

We aren’t writing Google off. It’s still important, especially as intent moves towards booking, but customers also move between social platforms, video content, communities and AI throughout the wider research process. If you think about the last time you booked a holiday, you probably used a few of these. 

From experience, I love to go on YouTube and check out creators who have visited the place I am due to go to really get me excited, and TikTok and Instagram for food, drink and activity recommendations, and I know I’m not the only one. 

Expedia Group’s 2025 Traveller Value Index found that 61% of consumers now use social media for travel inspiration, and 73% said an influencer recommendation had affected a travel booking decision. 

Someone might discover a ship through an Instagram Reel, watch three cabin tours on YouTube, Google the itinerary, read passenger reviews and opinions on Facebook groups, and compare options with AI models.

This doesn’t mean that every cruise agent suddenly needs to film trending TikTok dances at the docks in front of a cruise ship. 

What it does mean is that marketing teams need to understand which platforms are influencing which part of the decision, rather than treating every channel as another place to push the same offer.

Cruise lends itself well to conversational search because the decision contains so many variables. 

It’s to ask whether there’s enough evidence online for these systems to understand your business in the first place. 

To find out, we used our tool, LLMLens, to analyse leading cruise agents across a range of synthetic persona prompts, from broader discovery questions to much more specific comparison and booking queries. 

Instead of testing a handful of branded searches, we looked at the question types and the sentiment behind the mention, and the questions a user might actually have when researching their cruise options.

This analysis included prompts around areas such as:

• What’s the difference between booking direct with a cruise line versus using a travel agent?
• Where can I find genuine last-minute cruise deals from UK ports without hidden extras?
• Which UK agents specialise in premium cruise deals with added perks such as onboard credit and flexible flights?
• What are the best cruise deals for first-timers from the UK?
• Which luxury cruise agents are best for booking Regent, Seabourn or Silversea from the UK?
• What are the best small-ship cruise lines for first-time cruisers?
• Where should I book a family cruise from Southampton?
• Which UK cruise agents are best for specialist river or luxury cruise itineraries?

The leading brand accounted for about a quarter of all mentions, while other well-known names appeared only a handful of times.

Visibility also varied sharply by platform, and question type. The same brand could look dominant on one AI model and almost invisible on another, while broad discovery questions (“best cruise lines for first-timers”) tended to surface a wider spread of agents, and highly specific comparison questions narrowed down to a much smaller set of names.

Basically, competitors can disappear once a question gets specific enough.

That’s important because the specifics usually increase as someone gets closer to a decision.

The answer isn’t to add another channel to the plan and carry on as normal. Your approach should be across all marketing specialisms working in tandem to support the customer journey. 

Before creating another batch of content for AI visibility, find out where you’re already appearing. Which cruise topics are you associated with? Which competitors consistently appear alongside you? Which models cite your website, and where does your brand disappear as customer requirements become more specific?

That’s a much more useful starting point than treating “AI visibility” as one overall score. Our analysis shows it can change significantly by model, topic and customer need.

It’s tricky to attribute AI data, but with LLMLens, we can gather a good picture of how you stack up against competitors and key areas for growth. 

We aren’t saying throw all the commercial terms in the bin, but a large part of the customer journey happens before people know what they actually want. 

Commercial destination and cruise-line searches aren’t going anywhere. But our prompts repeatedly moved beyond “where should I go?” into “which option is right for me?”

That creates content opportunities around first-time cruising, cabin selection, direct vs agent booking, hidden extras, family suitability, luxury inclusions, small-ship comparisons and what genuinely represents good value.

The important bit is bringing real agent expertise into those answers. If your team has spent years explaining the difference between two ships to customers over the phone, there’s probably a useful piece of search content hiding in that conversation.

This could include ship reviews, first-hand comparisons, destination advice, staff recommendations, and detailed FAQs to give your knowledge a digital footprint. 

Our senior content executive, Amy, has done a great blog covering E-E-A-T in the wider travel industry, and how content that demonstrates Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trust helps your brand to provide unique content and cement yourself within your sector as a go-to source of fresh information. 

It’s all good having a site full of strong content, but search engines and AI models won’t only pull from there for these broader search queries – hence the importance of third-party coverage and expert commentary to build those E-E-A-T signals that get pulled into AI responses. 

Organic social has a role here, too. With cruise being a naturally visual industry, people will likely turn to social platforms to get a better idea of cruise types, and you can meet them there to answer their questions, show first-hand experience and give people that idea of what a holiday is actually like before they start comparing pricing. 

You can tell people you’re reliable, and know what you’re talking about, but it’s more believable when you’ve got third-party sources backing you up. 

Even though customers might discover and research cruises across more platforms, high-intent search still matters when someone moves towards booking – and Paid Media has an important role in capturing that demand.

The mistake is expecting Paid to do everything, and neglecting other channels. There’s a difference between creating and capturing demand, and that’s an important distinction. 

If certain destinations or cruise lines are converting well in Paid, that insight can help inform content, social media content, PR campaigns and creative across your site. 

There’s no point doing all of this work if when a customer gets to the website, they’re immediately stressed. 

Cruise agents already have the thing that’s hard to fake: real expertise in matching the right customer to the right ship, itinerary and cabin. What’s changed is where that expertise needs to show up, and how many places it needs to be findable.

Customers are researching across more platforms, asking more specific questions, and increasingly letting AI do some of the legwork before they ever land on a website. The agents who show up well in that process won’t be the ones shouting loudest on one channel, they’ll be the ones who’ve made their expertise genuinely easy to find, wherever the question is being asked.

Because having the answer is only commercially useful if customers can find you when they’re asking the question.