Carnival Australia best leaders departing, Loss in Australia’s cruise industry?

Tuesday, September 10, 2024 As P&O Cruises Australia prepares to sail its last summer cruise season, the cream of Australia’s cruising industry gathered recently in an upstairs lounge at Darling Harbour’s historic Pyrmont Bridge Hotel. David Jones was Carnival Australia’s corporate communications manager from 2009 to 2022. Now, he laments the departing of the best leaders our cruise industry had.

It was a get-together to farewell two of the local industry’s leading lights, Stuart Allison and Ryan Taibel. Stuart Allison hasn’t been lost to cruising — he is soon off to Britain to take up a senior role at P&O UK. Two conclusions are inescapable.

The demise of P&O Australia has sparked a significant loss of talent from the local industry. It is also seeing the departure of members of the “Ann Sherry Generation”. It raises a number of questions about the future prospects of the Australian cruise industry.

Will year round cruising remain a local feature? Have the authorities made it just too expensive for cruise companies to operate profitably in this market? One thing we do know is that we have steadily seen the departure of the “Ann Sherry Generation” of leaders who were at the forefront of the decade-plus years of exponential growth. Brand warriors including Stuart Allison and Ryan Taibel provided the ballast for Sherry’s audacious goal, as CEO of Carnival Australia, to see a million Australians cruising by 2020. The fact that the goal was reached five year.