The exposed location puts you at the mercy of the weather. First timers will constantly be peeking ahead to see what surprises are coming next. Unlike some private clubs, the course does not reflect an old, stodgy vibe, rather the course is both fun and visually stunning at every step. The club has an old money feel, steeped in history. Leaving it below the hole is a requirement. Once you get to the greens, you’ll find some of the fastest greens we’ve encountered. It’s really fun to hit your drive in just the right spot where it catches a downhill slope that acts as a speed slot, propelling your drive forward. The decision to remove a bunch of trees and embrace the links-like intent of the original design allows the land to show its true character. You will always find yourself multiple feet above or below your ball as the only flat areas on the course are the tee boxes! You will often find yourself multiple stories above or below your playing partners. The undulations and elevation changes from tee to green are some of the most dramatic we’ve seen. Rare for any American course, the majority of holes have water views!Īnd it’s not just the water views that make the course special. We think it absolutely lives up to the hype.Įastward Ho’s wow factor is off the charts. As such, Eastward Ho! gets a lot of hype. But it could become a necessity.Golf digest puts it at #7 in MA and #128 in America. For the moment, the decision by the big three to sail for China is a choice. In 2017 there could be the first fall on record in North American cruise-ship capacity, according to Robin Farley, an analyst at UBS, another bank. The future plans of the big three operators suggest they have concluded that the American market is saturated and has poor growth prospects. And in Britain cruise-passenger numbers have been falling since 2013 because newly retired people, staple customers, have less disposable income than the previous generation of pensioners, who are now too old to travel.

In Europe bookings have been hit by recent terrorist attacks in France and north Africa, according to Greg Badishkanian, a cruise-line analyst at Citigroup, a bank. Even so, betting on the rise of the Chinese holidaymaker looks more attractive than sticking to the main Western markets. If China’s economic slowdown intensifies, or if consumer interest in cruises turns out to be a fad, the operators risk being left with excess capacity and having their margins squeezed. One recent shopping craze on Carnival’s Chinese ships was for Japanese rice cookers, Mr Buckelew says. They are less interested than Americans or Britons in boozing and spa treatments, but keener on gambling, and really go to town in the onboard shops, buying such things as foreign-made appliances. This is partly because higher daily rates can be charged for the short, four-to-six-night cruises that are more popular in China, but also because the Chinese spend far more onboard. The Chinese market is also very profitable. The government wants to promote the cruise-lines business together with the building of the ships it uses, as part of a rebalancing of the economy towards consumption in its latest five-year plan. The number of mainland holidaymakers going on cruises-a comparatively fuss-free way of travelling abroad for the first time-has been growing by around 80% a year, and is expected to keep doing so despite China’s slowing growth rate. The number of Chinese households earning over $35,000 a year-the figure the industry sees as the point at which foreign travel takes off-has increased from 6m to more than 27m over the past decade, according to Oxford Economics, a consulting firm. Such are Carnival’s hopes for the Chinese market that it recently moved its chief operations officer, Alan Buckelew, to Shanghai to oversee the firm’s expansion there. Now they send their newest and best, such as RCL’s Quantum of the Seas, a megaship that can carry 4,180 holidaymakers, which has been based in Shanghai since June 2015. NCL, which has hitherto stayed away, plans to enter the Chinese market in 2017.Ĭarnival and RCL no longer send elderly cast-off hulks from America and Europe to China. RCL, which had three ships based in China in 2014, now has four and will add a fifth in the next few months. In October it announced the launch of a joint venture with a Chinese shipbuilder and China Investment Corporation, a sovereign-wealth fund, to establish the first new cruise brand aimed at the domestic Chinese market. In 2016 Carnival plans to increase the number of its ships in China from four to six.

Eastward ho