Carnival Cruises leads a "considerably weak" week of online cruise bookings

Carnival Corp. led a drop in cruise line bookings in the week through yesterday after the fire aboard the company’s Triumph ship last week, Barclays Plc said.

Carnival Cruise Line’s business was “considerably weak” as bookings in general were down from the prior week, based on information from travel agents, Felicia Hendrix, a Barclays analyst who rates the company’s shares equal weight, said in a report today. Competitors such as Royal Caribbean International didn’t have a similar decline, she said, without giving figures.

Carnival said last week that the Triumph fire, which stranded 3,100 passengers on the ship with limited food and bathroom facilities, would cost the Miami-based company 8 cents to 10 cents a share in the first half. Carnival’s ticket revenue fell 4 percent last year as it lowered prices after its Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Italy, taking 32 lives.

Vance Gulliksen, a Carnival spokesman, declined to comment about the Barclays report.

Carnival fell 1.1 percent to $36.51 at the close in New York. The shares have declined less than 1 percent this year, as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index gained 7.3 percent.

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