Premier Cruises

Premier Cruises was a cruise line holding company formed in the early 1990s that focused on the family cruise market as well as on developing cruise operations in new geographic markets. The company's business focus was to acquire older cruise vessels, refurbish these vessels in order to offer "traditional cruise experiences", operate the vessels in geographic areas, such as Europe and south/Central America, which the major operators such as Carnival Cruise Line, Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean International were not focusing at the time, and to market their cruises largely to Europeans and South Americans customers through strategic marketing partnerships with some of the major tour and travel groups in the world such as; Thomson Holidays in the U.K, TUI in Germany, Fritidsresor in Scandinavia, Alpitour in Italy, Pullmantur in Spain (acquired by Royal Caribbean International for USD 800 million) as well as through more than a dozen operators in south / Central America such as CVC in Brazil which was acquired by the Carlyle Group (63.6%) in January 2010 for USD 250 million. The company was operating out of its main offices in Cape Canaveral, and Miami, Florida.

The company was originally established as Cruise Holdings Ltd. by shipping entrepreneur, Kristian Stensby, in the early 1990s which was the entity that later became known as Premier Cruises after Cruise Holdings acquired Premier Cruise Line (and adopted the "Premier Cruises" name) in 1996.

After the acquisition, Premier Cruises consisted of three different operations; i.e. Premier Cruise Line (Oceanic or the "Big Red Boat"), Dolphin Cruise Line SS Dolphin IV, SS OceanBreeze, SS SeaBreeze, SS IslandBreeze, Seawind Cruise Line (SS Seawind Crown)(previously known as Companhia Colonial de Navegacao flagship the Infante Dom Henrique). as well as the vessel SS Rembrandt (previously known as Holland America Lines flagship the SS Rotterdam).

...
Wikipedia