I've seen people post such on various FB groups - that they put holds on rooms even though they knew it was not really possible because of school or whatever reason.
I'm not sure that was the case for this cruise. I've taken surveys in the past year on the
DCL website where they asked how likely you were to cruise certain destinations. Hawaii was consistently on there. It is likely that Disney knew the pull of Hawaii (especially since they hadn't been back since 2015). They've also got the paper comment cards. My guess is that Disney knew there was a huge demand for Hawaii. The pricing didn't change from Platinum to Gold to Silver, even as supply dwindled and people could only book GTY rooms. My guess is that DCL already priced the Hawaii cruise about as high as they wanted to because they
already knew it was going to sell out. If they didn't, given the quick surge in demand, they would have had to have price increases by the hour, which would exacerbate the situation even more and led to angry customers. Instead, I believe they took the approach of pricing it as high as they wanted to price it with the idea of substantial demand. Even then, given how popular the rooms are, I think you can say that they underpriced the cruise. That being said, it is 2020 and I suspect there will be cancellations through next year as people's plans firm up or conflicts get in the way.
You can take a look at the opening day pricing from 2015 and 2020 and I suspect the 2020 opening day prices would be be about 25% - 50% higher than the 2015 opening day prices to price in the higher price as if the cruise was going to sell out. Here are some examples:
2015 - Cat5B with 2A (no OBB) = $5901.40 (breakdown unknown)
2020 - Cat5B with 2A (no OBB) = $7488.54 (3580, 3580, 328.54 tax/fees)
This is a $1587.14 difference or approximately a
25% difference in pricing.
2015 - Cat6A with 2A (no OBB) = $5061.48 (breakdown unknown)
2015 - Cat6A with 2A (no OBB) = approx. $6762.08 (had to do some mathematical calculations based on 2 fare quotes)
That is a $1700.60 difference or approximately a
33% difference in pricing.
2015 - Cat11C (with OBB) = $3091.48 (breakdown unknown)
2020 - Cat11C (with OBB) = $4522.54 (2097, 2097, 328.54 tax/fees - had to calculate price with OBB)
That is a $1431.06 difference or approximately
46% difference in pricing.
Opening Day 2015
Opening Day 2020