Waystation: Vorian

The Genting Hong Kong infodump

This is an infodump I wrote about 6 months ago in a friend's Discord server when I was talking about getting nickel-and-dimed by Royal Caribbean as a paying guest and how it wasn't as bad as it could get because it'd get so much worse under the cruise lines that were owned by Genting Hong Kong. And as par for the course with my infodumps, it will take as many unnecessary tangents as I want.

Genting Hong Kong was founded in November 1993 by Malaysian billionaire Lim Kok Thay as a holding company for the Asian cruise line Star Cruises, and would go on to later establish Dream Cruises. With these two brands, it used to Own, and I mean Own the Southeast Asian cruise market.

As an aside: Both Star and Dream Cruises have a reputation of only providing the Bare Minimum for hotel-grade accommodations and charging extra for everything else. The biggest indication of this is that on american and european cruise lines like Royal Caribbean, Costa, and Carnival, there is always some place on the ship where you can get free food during normal waking hours. On Star and Dream ships you could only get free food at the main dining hall or buffet during the three designated three daily mealtimes.

Star Cruises ships, with their naming scheme based upon the western zodiac signs (i.e. SuperStar Leo, Star Pisces, SuperStar Virgo, etc), had been known and joked about in Hong Kong as little more than floating casinos, because that's what they were. This business model put Star Cruises in such a strong financial position that they could buy out Norwegian Cruise Line in 2000 and oversaw NCL's acquisition of the Project America assets in 2002, which is now the Pride of America. The Pride sails itineraries around the Hawai'ian Archipelago, which necessitates compliance with the Jones Act. A fun fact is that almost none of the world's modern cruise ships are compliant with the Jones Act, and Project America was launched with the specific goal of launching a ship and a cruise line that were compliant with it, with a side-effect of attempting to rejuvenate domestic american passenger shipbuilding. Regardless, they eventually divested themselves of full ownership, and eventually became a shareholder after NCL's IPO in 2013.

Basically, their public image in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong was already bad enough. Enter Royal Caribbean, with a few months of what I in hindsight can only call business-exploratory sailings in 2011 with the Legend of the Seas (69,472 Gross Tons, 1836-2435 pax, built 1993-1994 at Chantiers de l'Atlantique, Saint-Nazaire, France). It was likely the same kind of business model that Pop Mart uses with their vending machines, in order to gauge footfall and sales potential in exploratory locations before deciding to open a store.

The very first cruise holiday I had ever been on was on one of those initial cruise itineraries in march of 2011, when after a few months wintering in Singapore, the Legend went on a reposition cruise to rebase from Singapore to Shanghai. This, unfortunately, coincided with the Great East Japan Earthquake, the day of which I remember a lot cos we were docked and freezing in Hong Kong. Funnily enough it's also the one single time I've eaten at the, uh, "famous" Jumbo floating restaurant, which everyone I know says was a questionable dine at best.

Star Cruises and by extension Genting Hong Kong managed to coast along for a few more years offering outwardly cheaper cruise itineraries than Royal Caribbean. At the time the market was just them, Royal Caribbean, and a huge step up to actual luxury cruise lines like Cunard and Seabourn, so they weren't concerned about much. Eventually this changed in late 2015, when Genting Hong Kong announced the founding of Dream Cruises. This new cruise line was marketed as a more luxury and upscale cruise line compared to Star Cruises, and a direct product competitor to Royal Caribbean.

At that point, Royal Caribbean had already been seasonally homeporting their older (but still formerly largest-in-the-world, at ~138,000 Gross Tons / ~3300-3600 pax, built 1998-2003 at Kvaerner Masa-Yards, Turku, Finland) Voyager-class ships in Singapore. To that effect, their existing new-build for Star Cruises, the Genting Dream (150,695 Gross Tons, 3352 pax, built 2015-2016 at Meyer Werft, Papenburg, Germany), was transferred over to Dream Cruises as the first Neopanamax cruise ship to be operated by an Asian cruise line.

There was of course a countermove; a really quick one, in fact, because Royal Caribbean already had a similarly-sized ship that was also built by Meyer Werft that entered service the previous year. This was the Quantum of the Seas (168,666 Gross Tons, 4180-4905 pax, built 2013-2014, Meyer Werft), which after a first winter season based out of Cape Liberty in Bayonne, NJ, transferred to permanent Shanghai base in 2015, with her class sister the Ovation of the Seas (2015-2016, Meyer Werft) joining the Voyager-class Mariner of the Seas in 2017 to homeport in Singapore. After this, Genting Hong Kong embarked on a more aggressive expansion plan.

Apart from buying another luxury cruise line from the Nippon Yusen Kaisha conglomerate, and the launch of their second Genting-class ship, the World Dream (150,695 Gross Tons, 5000 pax, built 2015-2017, Meyer Werft), they decided to start vertically integrating. This started with a majority stake in Lloyd Werft, which ran the former Norddeutscher Lloyd shipyard in Bremerhaven. Eventually, with the design and ordering of two Global-class (208,000 Gross Tons, ~6000 pax) ships, they would eventually buy the former Mathias Thesen shipyard at Wismar, the Warnow shipyards at Rostock, which were the largest shipyards of East Germany, and the former Volkswerft at Stralsund. They would combine these three into the MV Werften conglomerate. It would then be focused on building cruise ships for Genting Hong Kong's three cruise lines, most notably with the first Global-class ship, the Global Dream, whose keel was laid at Wismar in 2018.

You might have noticed that I haven't posted any stats for the Global Dream, because this is where shit hits the fan. You might be thinking that going from stagnant business to aggressive expansion to post-Neopanamax megaship operations and shipyard ownership is, to be modest, a bit Risky. This amount of expansion requires a lot of upfront capital, and a lot of financial leveraging in order to supply said capital. This would leave a company vulnerable to, say, a global pandemic that completely disrupts the shipping, travel, and leisure industries.

Which is exactly what happened in 2020.

After announcing that they would cease payments to creditors and seek debt restructuring that August in order to preserve company operations, their share price fell over 40%. Saddled with over 3.37 billion USD in debt, they managed to limp on as the World Dream was one of two cruise ships, the other being the Quantum of the Seas, allowed to resume cruises with no intermediate stops under Singaporean guidelines in November. This continued until talks with the KfW banking group and the German government to get financial support for MV Werften fell apart, and both MV Werften and Lloyd Werft filed for liquidation on the 10th of January 2022. This triggered a panic over cross-defaults worth 2.8 billion USD, leading to another precipitous share dump, and Genting Hong Kong itself declared bankruptcy on the 19th. It would be very funny for me, a few days after, walking through the transfer hall at Dhoby Ghaut MRT Station where a big video wall advertisement was still up showcasing sailings that would never happen.

Star Cruises would be liquidated in April, and Dream Cruises in May. But that wasn't the end.

Of the four ships that Star Cruises operated at the start of 2022, only The Taipan (launched 1989 for the Windsor Line as the Lady Sarah, bought in 1991 by New Frontier Cruise Line to be the Aurora II, acquired by Star Cruises in 1994 as the MegaStar Aries, and briefly named the original Genting World before that name was given to the Genting Dream while it was being built) would avoid the scrapyard, being sold by liquidators to eventually end up as the missionary vessel and floating library Doulos Hope.
Dream Cruises operated three ships at the start of 2022:

The tentatively-named Global Dream II was little more than a laid keel, and was scrapped.

It would surprise absolutely nobody that the Genting and World would avoid the scrapyard, being less than ten years old.
The World was eventually sold at auction to Cruise Saudi, with funding from the Kingdom's Public Investment Fund, and eventually renamed to the AROYA, as the first ship of the Aroya Cruises brand. She now sails Red Sea itineraries, based in Jeddah.
The Genting and Explorer, however, have more... Interesting fates.
Those two ships were almost immediately bought by Resorts World, of Resorts World Las Vegas and Resorts World Sentosa Singapore fame. The Genting Dream kept its name, and the Explorer was renamed to the Resorts World One, upon which they were then immediately put back into service for the newly-launched Resorts World Cruises. Eventually, Resorts World would be able to purchase the IP rights for both Star and Dream Cruises, and launched a rebrand in March of 2025, reviving both brands, with the Genting "returning" to DreamCruises, and Resorts World One getting renamed to the Star Navigator for StarCruises service. And you might get an inkling that things are a little sus...

Alright. It's Chekov's Buried Lede time.

Genting Hong Kong was founded as a subsidiary of the Genting Group, which was owned by Lim Kok Thay's Father Lim Goh Tong. The name of the Genting Group comes from the Genting Highlands hill station, which Lim Goh Tong developed into a resort and casino for holidaymakers living in Kuala Lumpur and the greater Klang valley. It is currently marketed as Resorts World Genting, because surprise-surprise, Resorts World is yet another a franchise controlled by the Genting Group. Resorts World Cruises was a subsidiary of Genting Singapore, which is yet another holding company founded for the exact same reasons and functions as Genting Hong Kong was. And since Lim Goh Tong has been dead since 2007, guess who controls both the Genting Group and also Genting Singapore?

That's right, it's that rat bastard Lim Kok Thay.