Crystal's shut down ends an era. Maybe.

May 2002. I was six months into my job as editor in chief of Travel Weekly but taking only my first cruise in that capacity.

I boarded the Crystal Symphony in Los Angeles with 90 travel advisors, all members of the line’s President’s Club. They earned their place on the voyage by producing at least $350,000 in sales the previous year, which is really to say, $350,000 in just over eight months: Not many cruises were sold in 2001 after Sept. 11.

Only 90 out of what was then estimated to be 26,000 agencies qualified for the voyage, or approximately one in 300.

I had lunch with the line’s president at the time, Gregg Michel. “Why so few?” I asked him. “What’s the biggest impediment holding Crystal back from growing that number?”

“Convincing agents that they can, in fact, sell a cruise at this price point,” he replied. “Some are simply uncomfortable selling premium brands. They don’t believe in themselves.”

The next day, I heard an onboard lecture by Nando Parrado. Parrado was a surviving member of an amateur rugby team from Uruguay whose chartered plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and whose story was told in the movie and book “Alive” (Lippincott, 1974).

But more than just one of the survivors, he is one of the ones who, after they had been given up for dead, set out, underfed and underclothed, to cross the mountain range to get help.

Miraculously, he was successful. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more gripping speech.

How is it that an individual can, without proper gloves or boots, scale mountains in a desperate bid for help, but a Malaysian billionaire couldn’t rescue Crystal, a cruise line with a devoted following of travel advisors and guests?

The reality is it may be more in the realm of possibility for an individual to succeed against all odds than a corporation that falls victim to a chain of bad bets, bad timing and bad luck.

In his brilliant book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (Random House, 2015), Yuval Noah Harari points out that a corporation is a fiction. That’s not to imply that it’s somehow deceitful but rather that the progress of homo sapiens depends on people agreeing that an intangible concept is real, and if that happens, that fiction takes on a type of life. Without that agreement, it doesn’t. Examples he cites (in addition to corporations) are religion, political systems and concepts such as human rights.

But for humans to agree that a corporation exists, it needs money in proportion to its obligations. And in this, Genting Hong Kong, Crystal’s corporate owner, failed.

Do you have special memories of Crystal Cruises? We’d like to hear from you: Email your stories to us, and we’ll publish a selection of them.

Even so, there is another fiction that may yet come to Crystal’s aid: Its brand. When you read a financial statement, you’ll often see that among the assets is “goodwill.” It is an intangible asset — a fiction ­– yet a number of people, including potential buyers, may be in agreement that it has value. The goodwill associated with Crystal’s brand may yet keep the name “Crystal Cruises” alive.

Perhaps greatest among Crystal’s assets is its crew, which is very real, and whose reputation, though it would be described as a fiction by Harari’s definition, is foundational to the brand.

Excellent service is table stakes in luxury travel, and I’ve never had a complaint about the service on any of Crystal’s competitors. But I’ve also never heard the over-the-top raves that Crystal’s crew gets, as recently described by fellow Travel Weekly columnist Richard Turen.

It was that potent mix of the crew’s reality and the shared belief in Crystal’s brand that kept a three-ship line competitive to the very end. You may recall that in March 2021, when Crystal announced its Covid restart with an all-Bahamas cruise, it set the company’s record for single-day bookings.

One thing that has changed since my 2002 sailing with Crystal is that the number of travel advisors who feel comfortable selling luxury brands has increased considerably beyond the 90 who were at the time rewarded with the President’s Club cruise. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that suppliers, particularly among luxury brands, need solid relationships with agencies and advisors to prosper.

There’s no question that, should someone acquire the Crystal brand and try to leverage its goodwill, it will need to maintain its standards. And those standards are tied to — no, super-glued to — the crew. It’s not the ships, one of which turns 25 this year, that will revive the Crystal brand. And for that matter, perhaps not even brand-new ships to replace old tonnage could.

The lesson of “Alive” survivor Parrado involves individual will, strength, perseverance and faith. Similarly, the ability of Crystal to survive will require corporate will, strength, perseverance and faith.

The book “Alive” reads like fiction but is fact. Is there an entity out there that can keep the Crystal brand, a “Sapiens” fiction, alive? 

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