Growth

TourMaG – The summer is drawing to a close. What assessment do you make of the 2026 season?

Hervé Bellaïche : The assessment is fairly positive, at least above our expectations. We were concerned because market trends suggested a difficult market that had trouble stabilizing.

In the end, we recorded a large number of last-minute bookings, about 20% more than usual. We also achieved an excellent August, the best in five years. So we are very commercially satisfied.

Travel agencies have been a great help and today constitute our main growth engine.

Beyond the commercial results, what matters most for Catlante is the customer experience, the quality of service and overall satisfaction. And in this regard, feedback is consistently excellent. Clients come back telling us they spent fantastic holidays, sometimes even “the best holidays of their lives.” That is what motivates us to go even further and to make the brand more widely known.

TourMaG – Travel agencies have thus embraced the cabin-cruise concept on a catamaran. How did you develop this distribution network?

Hervé Bellaïche : A few years ago, Catlante was nearly exclusively sold direct. We found a second growth engine with travel agencies, thanks to the work undertaken for about two years to develop distribution networks.

It wasn’t necessarily easy. When you have a history of operating primarily through direct sales, you have to learn to work with a network of endorsers. I’ve been in the tourism industry for 20 years and for 20 years I’ve advocated this growth channel. I’m therefore very pleased that we managed to implement it at Catlante.

In the first half of the year, we’ve seen an 80% growth in travel agencies. It’s working very well, with two phenomena: some agencies are literally exploding their sales, with three- to fourfold increases over their previous level, while others still haven’t jumped aboard and are stagnating.

Our analysis is that some agencies have understood the appeal of this new type of vacation, which is popular, while others have not yet integrated this evolution.

TourMaG – The travel sector has faced the consequences of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Has your product proven particularly resilient?

Hervé Bellaïche : Yes. In summer, around 90% of our production is in the Mediterranean. We have many departures from the Marseille coast, up to Saint-Tropez, but also from Corsica toward the north and southern Corsica, or Italy.

We also have departures from Palma to Minorca and Majorca in the Balearics. So these are mainly close-to-home trips. We also have a few trips to the Seychelles, which were more affected by the difficulties related to the Middle East.

Our product is resilient and even acted as a kind of travel refuge.

Some agencies have called us saying they had clients initially planned for long-haul trips or even within France, in areas hit by storms or fires, who had to rethink their plans. That perhaps explains part of the last-minute bookings.

We notably had a few families who had planned to go to the Landes region, Cap-Ferret for example, and who ultimately redirected to a Catlante trip.

TourMaG – What is the current split between cabin cruises and privatizations?

Hervé Bellaïche : Catlante indeed does two kinds of offerings. We invented this cabin-cruise model: essentially sharing a boat, somewhat like a guesthouse on the sea. Our vessels are specifically designed for this, with plenty of space.

Clients frequently tell us they have met amazing people while still being able to live their own life. The act of sharing the boat can be a first hurdle at the time of booking, but once aboard, the initial hesitation completely fades away.

Today, roughly two-thirds of our activity comes from the cabin product. A couple, two couples or a family can take one, two or three cabins on the six cabins each boat offers. We have six cabins per boat, with a crew of two to three people.

The remaining one-third corresponds to groups or families who come together and privatize the boat.

TourMaG – Cabin cruising remains a niche product. Is it becoming more mainstream?

Hervé Bellaïche : I can’t speak for the entire industry, but at Catlante we sense strong demand.

I believe this owes more to the way Catlante operates than to a general democratization of the sector. The company has been around for 23 years and, for 23 years, we have focused on the same thing: cabin-catamaran cruises, whether cabin-based or privatized, with crew.

Our know-how, our methods and our approach help us build client loyalty. We operate at smaller volumes compared with large tour operators—probably 10, 20 or 50 times less. We handle between 6,000 and 10,000 passengers per year.

We perform our activities in a professional manner. It is craftsmanship on a grand scale. We always depart with 12 people. Each departure is precisely shaped, personalized and customized. Yet we manage to run roughly 500 departures per year.

TourMaG – What are your prospects for the winter season 2026-2027 and which destinations will you offer?

Hervé Bellaïche : The Caribbean is at the heart of our winter activity. The Grenadines stand out as a particularly fantastic destination to discover by boat and by catamaran.

We also propose tours around Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Barthélemy and Antigua and Barbuda. We have a whole range of Caribbean destinations that lend themselves especially well to catamaran vacations.

We reach incredible lagoons, moving from paradise beaches to paradise beaches, from secret coves to secret coves. It is quite amazing.

TourMaG – How does the winter season look commercially?

Hervé Bellaïche : Like many players, we’ve fallen a bit behind. We had a lot of momentum for the summer and managed to maintain it. For the winter, however, we sense a tendency toward last-minute bookings.

We still have quite a bit of availability for this winter. This does not overly worry us, but the activity will need to take off at the start of the autumn term. We look forward to the rentrée to boost sales and ensure that clients join us this winter.

We also tend to extend the summer season into September, or even late September, with departures in Corsica, the Balearics and more generally in the Mediterranean. We then begin the Caribbean season around mid-November. That gives us a little time to fill the order book.

TourMaG – 2027 will be an election year in France. Are you worried about the presidential elections?

Hervé Bellaïche : Not at all. What could actually worry us is purchasing power.

We remain with prices that, relative to the product’s quality, are very well positioned. In our satisfaction surveys, which we analyze in great detail, a large number of clients tell us that the value for money is incredible.

Nevertheless, we do not want to raise prices to keep the product accessible. We prefer to increase the number of boats and grow our customer base rather than raise rates.

We are not, either, in a discounting framework. We have never done it and we will never do it.

One can be concerned about the situation of French clients and their purchasing power. On the other hand, I do not think that the fact that people must vote or fear what is going to happen will stop them from travelling. The experiences from previous years have shown us that this kind of context did not have a drastic impact on the travel industry.

TourMaG – What will be Catlante’s next engagements with tourism professionals?

Hervé Bellaïche : We obviously continue all our familiarization tours and our actions with professionals. Our salespeople travel across France to meet travel agencies.

We are increasingly organizing familiarization trips and ship visits. It’s enough to contact Catlante and our sales team to arrange this kind of event.

We have put a lot of work into this area this year. We welcomed around 2,000 people, including nearly 500 travel agents aboard our ships to discover our product.

We will also be present at the IFTM, even though we will unfortunately not have a stand, as we do not yet have the budgets required or the critical size to do so. We will also be present at the Grand Pavois in La Rochelle at the end of September, at Cannes for the Nautical Fair, and at the Paris Boat Show in November.

Finally, we will organize in the coming months an evening bringing together our clients and our most loyal agencies, as well as a few partners and friends, to allow everyone to meet.

Because travel, too, is about that. At Catlante, it is about meeting, sharing and exchanging.

In a world that is very disconnected, what we advocate with Catlante is reconnecting with nature, switching off the phone, real reconnection and reconnecting with oneself. We want to connect and reconnect clients with one another.