When Viking Holdings reported on its finances in mid-November, it raised eyebrows with news about advance bookings.
Two months before 2024 had even ended, Viking said that it had already sold 70% of its available cabins for 2025. While all cruise lines book out a year or more in advance, few the size of Viking lock down so much inventory so early. When looking only at Viking's ocean cruise business, the number jumps to 74%.
And while the Big Three cruise companies -- Carnival Corp., Royal Caribbean Group and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings -- have also reported record booked positions this year, none have exceeded 70%. Those companies have reported that nearly half of their 2025 capacity had been booked as of September, putting them about four months ahead of schedule, according to Matthew Boss, J.P. Morgan's head of leisure and retailing.
Viking went public in early 2024, so its third-quarter report last month was just the third one that Viking has issued on its business. Investors are still adjusting to what they say is a unique business model for a cruise line.
"Viking is a different beast from what Wall Street is used to as far as a cruise company," said Patrick Scholes, a stock analyst at Truist. "Viking's cruises are booked much further in advance than, say, a Carnival cruise."
The consequences of Viking's unusually long booking curve include the possibility that it is reducing short-term profitability, analysts say.
When you do wait until the last minute for Viking, you aren't going to get exactly what you want.– Katie Bates, Love Travel Connection
And for travel advisors, it means that the hot cabins on prime dates may be gone when their clients, more accustomed to traditional cruise booking curves, look to book. And those clients might need to be flexible if they still want to cruise Viking next year.
Viking founder and chairman Torstein Hagen said during the earnings call that the company's booking position "reflects how well our products resonate with our target customer."
Analysts largely agreed, but several other factors also seem to be at work.
One of them is the economy. Interest rates were high early this year, and many forecasters said a recession would not be surprising. In that context, getting business on the books in case demand stalled might have seemed prudent.
But the recession never arrived.
"At the start of the year I was concerned about the economy, but bookings have not stopped," said Bill Walsh, president of Cruise Travel Outlet in Salem, N.H. "We haven't really had a slowdown."
Another good reason to harvest early bookings is that 2024 was a presidential election year. There is a well-known pause in travel sales as elections approach and consumers are distracted by campaigning.
Analysts also say that when it was privately owned, Viking felt free to manage for the long-term and avoid booking to stimulate quarterly profits. That remains the case, Scholes said.
"If there's any company that seems to be the most long-term-focused, you'd probably pick Viking," he said.
And then there is Viking's targeted demographic and geographic profile. Viking is explicit in targeting couples ages 55-plus, and the vast majority of its cruises sail in Europe. That means that Viking customers have the time and flexibility to book ahead and that the trouble and expense of overseas travel tends to promote advance planning.
Carnival Corp. customers, on the other hand, skew younger, and most of its cruises leave from U.S. ports. Big cruise companies like Carnival also manage short-term profits more closely, Scholes said.
"At the moment, where companies are seeing the most pricing power is with unsold cabins booked two or three months out, where they're really ratcheting up the price," he said.
Viking loses some of that, but, Scholes said, "at the end of the day being well booked is a good thing."
Still, according to Viking CFO Leah Talactac, it's possible that next year the booking curve won't be quite as accelerated.
Acknowledging the impact of the election, she told analysts during the call that the company "started to kind of accelerate the booking curve" to the point that it had accelerated this year more than what it had been prior to the pandemic. "I think you will start to see some normalization of that moving forward," she said.
That may be good news to travel advisors who are feeling the limited inventory.
Anna Wakham, an independent contractor near Nashville with Key to the World Travel, said that a few weeks ago she went to look for an Explorer suite for clients seeking Viking's Grand European itinerary next spring or summer. She found just one.
"I was shocked," she said.
Katie Bates, an independent contractor at Love Travel Connection in Shallotte, N.C., said that after a recent event co-sponsored by her local Viking rep she had clients primed to buy for next spring.
"I was having a very difficult time trying to find a veranda stateroom because that's what everyone wants," she said. "Really all that was left was just your standard rooms that have little portholes."
Lesson learned.
"When you do wait until the last minute for Viking, you aren't going to get exactly what you want," Bates said.