So is Royal Caribbean's Early Assign a money grab or is it actually a really good idea?

You know, when Real Caribbean announced Early Assign, I have to mention I never saw this coming at all.

Sometimes Real Caribbean does things and you're like, you know what?

I kind of thought they might go in that direction. This was not one of them.

Early Assign is a new program that Royal Caribbean announced recently. It's technically a test pilot, but I suspect it'll be sticking around.

Essentially, this is for anybody who books a guarantee cabin.

Guarantee cabins are the type of cabins you book in which you let Royal Caribbean choose your room.

Traditionally, this is the way it works.

You spend less money, or cost you less money, I should say, to get a guarantee cabin rather than picking your exact room for you.

And as a trade-off, you have to wait for Royal Caribbean to actually assign it for you.

Essentially, what rural Caribbean is going to do is they're going to say, all right, we're going to wait for other people to book up cabins.

And then those unsold cabins that we have left over will use those to assign them for the guarantee.

Now, in addition, the guarantee cabins are also a workaround or a backup, if you will, for the

last minute cancellations. If you don't know, Royal Caribbean all the cruise lines,

oversell their cruise ships. It's a normal tradition. Basically, cruise lines know by this point

that there's a certain

percentage of churn, I believe, or churn and burn is the technical term, where basically they assume,

okay, for all the passengers who are booked on a cruise, a certain percentage will no-show or

will cancel at the last minute. And so they oversell the ship with that understanding.

That's why sometimes, very rarely, you have a ship that remains oversold because not enough

people canceled or didn't know show or whatever.

And so they have a situation where they need volunteers essentially to get off the ship.

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