A third ship is still being considered for luxury cruise line SeaDream Yacht Club, the company’s president Bob Lepisto confirmed yesterday.
In December 2019, the line announced it had decided not to proceed with building the 220-passenger SeaDream Innovation, which was scheduled to be delivered in 2021.
Cruises had already been sold for destinations including Svalbard, the Northwest Passage and Antarctica, and all booked guests were issued refunds. At the time, SeaDream owner and chairman Atle Brynestad said: ‘We hope to announce a new ship in 2020.’
In a Q&A session on board SeaDream II in London yesterday, I asked Mr Lepisto: ‘Pre-Covid, you announced plans for another, slightly bigger, ship. Are those plans still in the background?’
He replied: ‘We do have those plans. We made a decision not to move forward with that, which was a mutual decision with the yard, so it won’t be exactly what we had planned in the past. Times have changed and the demands in the market place have changed so there are opportunities that are a little different than that was at the time.
‘In retrospect that was a blessing because that would have come out just at the time of Covid, so from the standpoint of a small, privately-owned company, it was a blessing and not a problem.’
When I asked directly: ‘Are you still planning another ship?’, he replied: ‘Yes.’
The fleet currently consists of two identical 112-passenger ships, SeaDream I and II, which were built in the mid-80s but have been extensively refurbished.