Disney Cruise Line has flagged its confidence in the Australasian market goes beyond a one-off season, securing cruise berthing slots in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for the 2024/25 season.
Just as LATTE exclusively foreshadowed Disney Cruise Line’s entry to local waters in July last year with the deployment of Disney Wonder for the 2023/24 Australasia cruise season, LATTE can reveal a similar program for the 2,400-passenger ship for the subsequent season is already taking shape.
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Currently, Disney Cruise Line is only listing departures online aboard Disney Wonder until May 2024. Those May 2024 sailings are from San Diego to the Baja region and a four-night Pacific Coast voyage from San Diego to Vancouver on 9 May. That leaves a void in Disney Wonder‘s scheduled for a highly likely Alaska and Inside Passage season over the northern summer, before a suspected repositioning cruise across the South Pacific, via Hawaii, in early October, replicating the upcoming deployment.
Port schedules in Australia now indicate Disney Wonder will return to Sydney on 18 October 2024, docking at White Bay. The ship will then immediately head north for a deployment in Brisbane where Disney Cruise Line is holding cruise berth slots on 22, 25 and 28 October 2024.
Disney Wonder is scheduled for another dozen port calls in Sydney, both at White Bay and the Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay, on the following dates;
- 6 November 2024;
- 21, 24 and 28 December 2024;
- 3, 6, 1o, 14, 16 and 22 January 2025;
- 7 and 10 February 2025
Provisional bookings with Victoria Ports show Disney Wonder will operate ten turnaround sailings from Station Pier, Port Melbourne, starting on 1 November 2024, followed by :
- 3, 10, 13, 17, 20, 24 November 2024, then;
- 26 and 30 January 2025
- 3 February 2025
The period from late November to the second half of December is likely to involve transTasman voyages to New Zealand and a repeated deployment from Auckland. This however cannot be verified as Ports of Auckland is not publically listing its schedules this far in advance.
Though not on sale as yet, this planned 2024/25 deployment of Disney Wonder Down Under provides a much longer booking window for guests to plan and potentially secure one of DCL’s local voyages, which appears to follow a similar pattern to the 2023/24 schedule, operating as a combination of 2-, 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-night sailings, cruising to ports such as Eden, NSW and Hobart, Tasmania and the South Pacific.
Disney Cruise Line’s confidence in the Australia/New Zealand market was highlighted directly to LATTE in September last year by Thomas Mazloum, President of Disney Signature Experiences, at the official launch party of the ‘Disney Magic at Sea’ program at the Sydney Opera House.
Speaking just days ahead of the program’s official launch, when quizzed by LATTE if the 2023/24 season was a one-off program or likely to be ongoing for future years, Mazloum said the COVID pandemic had sparked Disney Cruise Line to consider “new opportunities. That’s how we came up with this”.
“And I just think it’s the beginning of something…but I’m very bullish about it, so maybe every year, we’ll have a ship down here,” Mazloum flagged.