V.Ships Leisure has taken over the management of two cruise ships that were last operated by Genting Hong Kong’s Dream Cruises brand.
The Monaco-based ship manager has been tasked with keeping the 150,700-gt cruise ship World Dream (built 2017) and 151,000-gt cruise ship Genting Dream (built 2016) in warm lay-up while liquidators Alvarez & Marsal Asia deal with the fallout of Asian cruise giant’s financial collapse.
The addition of these two ships brings the number of Genting ships that are being managed by V.Ships to five.
The ship manager took over the technical management of the three cruise ships operated by Genting’s Crystal Cruises brand in March.
The World Dream has been under arrest in Singapore since the beginning of March at the request of KfW IPEX-Bank while the Genting Dream, which is owned by a consortium of Chinese banks led by the Bank of Communications, is laid up in Hong Kong.
Dream Cruises’ third ship, the 75,300-gt cruise ship Explorer Dream (built 1999), was recently moved from Taiwan to an anchorage off Port Klang in Malaysia to join the four ships that were last operated by Genting's Star Cruises brand.
Sources close to Genting told TradeWinds that efforts are still ongoing to rescue the Dream Cruises brand, a prominent player in the Asian cruise sector, so no efforts are being made to market the ships for sale.
Efforts are also being made to find a buyer for the Crystal Cruises brand and its fleet of luxury cruise, expedition and river ships.
Cruise industry sources said there was “still a lot of value” in the Crystal brand, although it was likely that the river cruise operations and ocean cruise operations are sold separately.
The four older ships that were operated by Star Cruises, Genting’s Asian mass-market brand, are being marketed individually through broking channels.
These are the 51,300-gt cruise ship SuperStar Aquarius (built 1993), the 50,800-gt cruise ship SuperStar Gemini (built 1992), the 40,000-gt cruise ship Star Pisces (built 1990) and the 3,370-gt cruise ship The Taipan (built 1991).
Cruise brokers described these ships as being “not very attractive” to trading buyers given their age and the current state of the cruise market.
So far only one of Genting’s ships has been sold. A recycling deal involving 42,300-gt cruise ship SuperStar Libra (built 1988) that was in process at the time of Genting’s bankruptcy has now been finally concluded, TradeWinds was told by sources familiar with the deal.
Ownership of the SuperStar Libra, which since 2018 had been docked in the German port of Wismar as an accommodation vessel for workers building new cruise ships at Genting HK-owned MV Werften, was transferred to Marshall Islands-registered Flash Maritime, a shipowning vehicle that temporarily owns ships that are sold Turkish ship recyclers, at the end of March.
The SuperStar Libra was linked to a scrap sale last November, but the deal was delayed due to problems with the paperwork required for the ship to leave Germany, and later by Genting’s liquidation filing.
