aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Gays Cruising

Coming in the Sunday NYTimes:

NEXT Memorial Day weekend, Cunard’s behemoth liner the Queen Mary 2 will depart for a routine six-day Atlantic crossing from New York to Southampton, England, with the usual white-glove service, decadent cuisine and formal evening wear after sundown. The difference this time: practically all the guests aboard the 2,592-passenger cruise will be gay. It’s a first for Cunard. The line signed a deal earlier this year with RSVP Vacations, a gay travel company that has chartered the ship. The agreement is one sign among many of gay cruises’ progression into the mainstream of cruise travel.

Most gay-cruise operators run charter businesses, paying cruise lines to use their ships and crews. In the early days of gay cruises, about 20 years ago, that often meant working with little-known lines or securing second-tier ships. Itineraries often included just a handful of gay-friendly destinations. But as the overall rate in the growth of passengers and spending has slowed in recent years, the cruise industry has become keenly aware of the gay travel market, estimated at $55 billion and growing.

Gay travelers tend to take trips more often, stay longer and spend more than other travelers…

We won’t go to Jamaica but:

[W]hile a gay cruise charted by Atlantis Events was turned away from the Cayman Islands in 1997, this year 3,200 passengers on a similar cruise by the same company were greeted in the Caymans with rainbow-patterned welcome signs in some shop windows.[...]

In fact, gay cruises have become so popular that a reverse phenomenon is starting to emerge. “We’re finding a lot of gay travelers have straight friends who want to be a part of this,” said Tom de Rose, owner of Friends of Dorothy Travel in San Francisco. Because of this, he said, gay cruises are increasingly becoming “straight-friendly.”