Battle Stations

Boats take on hotels in the fight for business meetings

There used to be two don'ts for corporate-meeting planners: don't take employees on a ship, and don't serve them fish. But that's just what the cruise-ship industry is trying to do. The industry built a fleet of leviathans in the '90s, which led to a glut and depressed prices last year. So now it has launched an aggressive campaign to grab a piece of the more than $20 billion corporate-meeting and incentive (or employee-reward) business.

In the past five years, all major cruise lines have striven to make themselves meet-worthy. Leading the pack is Royal Caribbean, which in 1995 introduced...

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