Pre-tax profits for the three months to 31 March increased by 43 per cent to $27m (£19m) while sales fell to $512m compared with $542m a year earlier."If you look at the wider vacation market, cruising has come through better than other areas," Mr Ratcliffe said. "Clearly, it's early to be too precise but we are increasingly confident that we will see a return to normality by the end of the year."The group said like-for-like net revenue yields, which measures how much money cruise lines maker per passenger, fell 8 per cent. It expects net yields to fall in the second and third quarter but to recover in the fourth quarter, limiting the full-year decline to 5 to 6 per cent. This will be offset by a full-year reduction in underlying costs of 7 per cent, the company said."It is incredibly bullish ...

In the UK it reflects that people have been less impacted by 11 September and travelling patterns than people expected. In the US it reflects an improving US economy and consumer spending and the growth of the overall cruise market," said Simon Champion, an analyst at Deutsche Bank.P&O Princess must wait until the summer to learn whether regulators will approve both the Royal Caribbean deal and a hostile £4.8bn bid from Carnival Corporation, the market leader.It intends to launch the brochure for Ocean Village, its new cruise brand aimed at 35-to-45 year olds in June.. CGNU, the UK's largest insurer, yesterday paid the price for diving headlong into low-profit stakeholder pension business, with a fall in new business margins in the first three months of the year. CGNU, already under fire for plans to slash its dividend and change its name to Aviva, saw its shares fall 6 per cent to 728p.CGNU has become the largest provider of low-cost stakeholder pensions, with 20 per cent of the market, since they were launched in April 2001.

One of the ways it has gained market share is by offering higher commissions to intermediaries than some of its main rivals. CGNU does not expect positive cash flow from stakeholders, which can charge only 1 per cent a year, for eight to ten years.Philip Scott, director of the UK life business, admitted that the rapid expansion of CGNU's stakeholder and other pension business had hit margins. He defended CGNU's policy on commissions, saying: "Our commissions tend to be average or slightly above. But we don't pay the highest commissions and since April we have reduced them."Stakeholder new business helped to drive CGNU's UK life and pensions sales up 15 per cent to £339m on an annual premium equivalent (APE) basis, which takes account of current and future profits.While the increase in business in the UK's mature market was viewed as impressive, analysts were disappointed with CGNU's performance in the rest of Europe, which the company had identified as a key growth area.Roman Cizdyn, an analyst at Commerzbank, said: "Richard Harvey [CGNU's chief executive] told investors at the AGM that he was cutting their dividend in order to generate profitable growth.