while you suspect that there are a lot of people that would never consider booking
dcl unless they had young children i suspect that there are just as many that would. us for example. last year it was us and our two grown sons and their significant others but no children there either. i see lots of couples who are on board, just the two of them, in fact there's a lot of posts by those people who want to know what its like without children.
They are separate populations. There will always be a certain number of passengers that are willing to book DCL without kids and have never been on DCL before. My point is that in addition to that, there's another group of passengers that would not do so sight unseen, but will do so going forward once they experience it with kids. This second population is going to tend to increase over time.
i just wonder if they are seeing a down trend already. maybe, maybe not.
The recent changes (e.g. price increases for 2017, adding paid food to the bars, adding paid ice cream and candy to the Dream, and the new alcohol policy announced over the summer) are unlikely to have had much of any effect on the recent Fantasy b2b with low passenger counts being talked about here. As to their effect on 2016/2017 bookings, only time will tell.
DCL is in a somewhat unique position with their pricing: AFAIK, it never goes down after sailings are initially released, and usually goes up. I would imagine that the amount it goes up is dependent on how booking is going for each sailing. They do offer the *GT rates, but only after final payment deadline such that people already booked can't take advantage of them. And, AFAIK, unlike many other lines, DCL doesn't have any "opaque" booking channels, where "cruise liquidators" offer "deep discounts on unsold cabins." With the exception of Disney cast member rates, and the now-scarce Florida resident and military discounts, everyone pays the same rate. So, they don't have as much opportunity to "dump" unsold inventory if they guess wrong about supply and demand and overprice a sailing by too much. Also, I think that DCL is very wise in their pricing model, and have not made the mistake that WDW has made, where they've offered deep discounts in the off-season and run promotions like "dining plan at no extra cost" during certain periods. WDW has trained a certain population of guest to not book an on-site resort except during these discount periods. What initially was planned to be something to put "heads in beds" with the notion that an occupied room at almost any price is better than an empty room has instead turned into something that has eroded the pricing power. Hotels in general did the same thing when Priceline first came out: they sold rooms in many cases at half the price that they normally would charge, under the notion that half-price is better than an empty room, and that with Priceline being opaque, it wouldn't cut into their normal pricing. But, once enough people started using Priceline, a good number of them figured out that they really don't need to pay any more than half price, and that with careful planning, the cost savings is well worth not knowing exactly what property they'll get.
Contrast this with pricing at
Disneyland: for example, it's neigh impossible to get a room at the Grand Californian for much less than $400 a night at any time of year, even if it's the off season. They simply don't price the rooms below a certain level, regardless of booking levels. But to fill empty rooms, they offer "extend your stay for $150/night" offers to current guests if they have lots of empty rooms. They can fill up many otherwise-empty rooms at a discount rate instead of leaving them empty, but without ever discounting the price required to book a room. This way, people are not trained to wait until the discount period to book, because there never is any.
