Word: cunard
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...British thrive on adversity, then the Cunard Steam-Ship Co. Ltd., the grand old lady of transatlantic travel, should thrive. With unusual candor, Sir Basil Smallpeice, chairman of the Cunard group since November, recently stated the dimensions of adversity. Passenger operations have lost $40 mil lion in the past five years. Cargo ship ments and other sources of revenue turned the loss into a slight profit, but, said Sir Basil, Cunard has only been kept going by the sale of investments and property and by tax recoveries...
...Cunard's basic trouble is competition in the air. From a peak of 1,000,000 passengers who traveled by sea across the Atlantic in 1957, the total dropped to 650,000 last year. In the same period, the number of passengers traveling by air across the Atlantic rose from 1,000,000 to 4,000,000 annually. Sir Basil is determined not to let Cunard founder. His philosophy is: "If we go on regarding ourselves as primarily transport operators, then there isn't any future for us, because the airlines have captured the pure transport market...
First off, Sir Basil has made Cunard more shipshape by reorganizing it into five divisions with young men at the top of each one. Last week he ended the old separation between seagoing men in Southampton and headquarters men in Liverpool by moving passenger headquarters to Southampton. He is planning package holiday tours, hopes to increase winter cruise bookings by "keeping the ships in the sun more than...
...venerable, 26-year-old Queen Elizabeth has been renovated at a cost of $4,200,000. Cunard is building an $80 million, 58,000-ton ship, known as the Q4. The Q4 is being built as a cruising hotel: instead of being segregated into classes, passengers will have the run of the ship, but will have the choice of different cabins and restau rants at different price ranges...
With the Q4, Cunard hopes to dump its old-tub, cold-mutton reputation and start filling as many cabins as the Italian and French lines fill on their slick new vessels. The Q4 will be commissioned in 1968, but, says Sir Basil, "Cunard line's passenger service must be paying its own way by that time...