Place your bets on a new ship

The idea of having a Press conference during the inaugural voyage of a cruise ship has always seemed rather a futile exercise. The senior executives feel obliged to attend but are determined to give nothing away, and the assembled hacks from around the world have such disparate interests that their questions would be more profitably put in more intimate surroundings.
Nevertheless, Richard Fain gathered his top team in the Studio B ice rink on board Allure of the Seas and immediately threw carefully-laid plans into chaos by picking up his stool to bring it nearer the audience, but out of the spotlight and into the feedback zone for the microphones.
Unaccustomed to the early hour, and knowing any answers were likely to be evasive, reporters struggled to put together sensible questions. Bound by company law, the executives were unable to announce anything of great significance.
What we all really wanted to know was when Royal Caribbean would announce that they have placed an order for new ships.
Fain and RCI chairman Adam Goldstein were able to say that they would not be building any more ships as big as the 225,000-ton giants Allure and Oasis, but could not be more specific about what they would be building.
Even when it emerged that American investment analysts had come away from their meeting with the executives believing that an order would be placed next year, for delivery in 2014, it was impossible to draw a flicker of a hint.
Fain is not going to make that sort of announcement to journalists on a three-day inaugural cruise, and he certainly wasn’t about to confirm it to me when I chatted to him in Allure’s Central Park.
But if I were a betting man . . .