Three months ago, Gebhard Rainer was CEO of Sandals Resorts International, a brand known for its warm, beachy vacations in the Caribbean. Today he is leading HX (formerly known as Hurtigruten Expeditions), an expedition cruise line associated with cruising to some of the coldest places on the planet. Rainer sat down with cruise editor Andrea Zelinski on the Fridtjof Nansen to talk about what drew him to HX and where he wants to take the line.
Gebhard Rainer
Q: Had you been on an expedition cruise before joining HX?
A: I'd never been on a cruise. I've been on cruise ships in port, but I've never been on a cruise. I'm not a cruise fan; I don't want to go onto these big ships. My first thought was, you must be crazy. Going on a ship? That's not me. But when I started looking at it and exploring it more and looking at what the principles of the company are, what the goals are, how the investors would like to have it positioned and what the principal ideas behind it are -- that's what really caught my interest. Namely sustainability, education, science, working with communities; all of that is very important to me.
Q: What direction do you want to take HX?
A: A very big part of what I classify as success for us as an organization is the fact that we want to achieve a mindset change with our customers. But it needs to be done responsibly, and it needs to be a mindset that has a purpose. I think purpose is extremely important when you are in the cruise business, because there's a negative connotation to the footprint that we leave behind.
The communities that we touch when we go up north into the Canadian Arctic or Greenland, where you have very remote communities, makes it important for us to work with those communities and not have the communities work for us. Meaning that we don't go there and dictate to them: "Put up a song-and-dance show for our guests at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and we pay you $1,000." We actually go there and say, "What can we do for you, and how can we work with you to improve your life," and at the same time have a meaningful experience for our guests coming through here that helps us, helps them, to think differently about the world.
Q: How is demand right now?
A: The demand has normalized to the extent that customer behavior has returned to what it typically was before the pandemic with a few adjustments. We're all creatures of habit, and we've gone back to what we always have done, meaning there's very little spontaneous booking anymore. As we were coming out of the pandemic, everybody picked up the phone and said, "Tomorrow, I want to be there." People have gone back to planning again. They look at expedition cruises a year out, two years out. So the demand is still there. It's just now spread out, as it used to be.
Q: Strategically, what is HX's plan for North America?
A: We currently have about 18% of our business from North America. We believe that that should be around 50% of our business. North America still is the largest consumer market in the world; at some point, China or India might take over, but at the moment, it still is the largest consumer market. It also is a market that increasingly is discovering expedition cruises. The Canadian market is ahead of the U.S. market in terms of its knowledge about expedition cruises, but the U.S. market has become very curious about this, and we can see this in the demand, as well.