THROUGHOUT the past year it has been tough to see the impact of the pandemic and the suspension of cruising on our trusted partners.
The entertainment fraternity is among them with the way the arts have been particularly affected and now hope for a pathway back to cruising.
They include Graeme Gillies, the founder and head of Grayboy Entertainment and his team who act as agents for our onboard entertainers and the creative power behind our onstage productions.
Graeme closed his Sydney office after 28 years of building his business to concentrate his non-cruise creative activities on the Gold Coast at Burleigh Heads.
As Graeme explains, hundreds of entertainers are feeling the same pressure and living in hope that cruising will return.
“Some are out driving ubers, some have quit, some are gardening, some are just hanging on by literally no more than JobKeeper and quite fearful about that ending in a few weeks time. That’s just the reality. The arts have been hit hard. It’s a perfect storm in my case, a double whammy.”
Graeme established Grayboy Entertainment in 1992 building it up to include creative people from the now closed Sydney office at Potts Point along with specialised contractors providing their services as designers, directors, programmers and technicians.
He is the first to acknowledge that having to scale back the business has been traumatic to say the least.
“I have had some dark moments. The way it has played out, it is just as well that I had made the hard decision now. I am not pretending anything is otherwise at the moment than bleak (for the entertainment industry).”
So, as we look forward to cruising’s return with increasing optimism, it’s important to know that our partners are also enduring a tough time of uncertainty. Like us, they look forward to the return of cruising and the restoration of their livelihoods and, in Graeme’s case, a creative partnership with us.
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