Orient Express

But our train business is something we've been doing for almost 50 years.

It was one of our founding acts when jim sherwood our founder he went around europe he collected some of the original carriages of the famous venice simplen orient express train and put it together we launched that in 1982. so from then we have been building trains around the world from singapore to peru to scotland to now we we launched the britannic explorer here in in london last year and of course the venice simplen orient express We've been doing it forever.

So what's great about our opportunity is we have internal numbers.

We know what it costs to build a train.

It's really not an effort to convince somebody.

You just have to make them aware that it exists.

So I find, you know, when I'm out talking about Belmond, I'll say, so, you know, we have the amazing Copacabana Palace in Rio, or we have Villa San Michele in Fiesole in Florence, and we have the Venice Simplon Orient Express, and they say...

What? Wait, what? And when it is brought to their attention, that is the thing that pops.

yes.

Do you see the Orient Express sailing yacht coming in as competition to you directly or

No, it's actually not.

I love, I mean, I love it when brands are innovating the small ship space because it does generate awareness.

And so a lot of the executives there will say, well, I'm not a cruiser, but I love Windstar.

And it's just the thing that we hear all the time, right? We tell travel advisors, If you have a client that wants to experience the Mediterranean and they're just skeptical about a cruise, Windstar is the perfect product for you to introduce them to because they will love what it is a yacht style experience and they'll understand what small ship cruising is all about once they do experience Windstar.

I love also what you said about when we were speaking about Orient Express, right? It's interesting because everybody is getting in the space, right? You have Aman coming into the space.

Of course, Four Seasons.

So if you're a large corporate, so for example, one of our big clients is Accor Hotel.

They have 45 brands in everything from the Ibis, Swissatel, Novatel, Pullman, Orient Express, Raffles, you name it.

We've been working with them at board level and... senior leadership team for the last four years.

That's a business that they're doing great things with AI and it's a human to human business, right? It's hospitality, it's service.