Update on Isabella.. I mean, Isabelle.

Today Tallink released the following press release:

Published: 2013-04-22 11:54:57 CEST
 Tallink Grupp
Company Announcement
 Completion of purchase
 Tallinn, 2013-04-22 11:54 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hansalink Limited, a subsidiary of AS Tallink Grupp today completed the transaction of purchase the cruise ferry Isabella from Viking Line ABP.
  The newer vessel with more passenger and car capacity will replace M/S Silja Festival on the Riga-Stockholm route, meeting the increased demand on that route. The ship will start service departing Riga in the second week of May under the new name Isabelle
          Harri Hanschmidt
         Head of Investor Relations
      
         AS Tallink Grupp
         Sadama 5/7. 10111 Tallinn
         Tel +372 640 8981
         E-mail harri.hanschmidt@tallink.ee
 This news release was distributed by GlobeNewswire, www.globenewswire.com – a NASDAQ OMX company

 Briefly, Tallink is renaming Isabella to Isabelle (In fact, they already did). On one hand, it seems very.. lazy. Isabelle is a very common name among ships. If they continue with the same attitude, Isabelle will probably end up looking like this.

If that will really happen, I'll be quite angry, because it will be an even clearer indicator, that Tallink bought her to get rid of the possible competition, not because of their actual interest in a new ship.

On the other hand, naming the ship Isabelle is quite clever. It totally eliminates the Viking Lineish feeling, without really changing the name too much. Isabella has had a long and successful career without any big accidents, always under the same name.

Either way, I really hope that Tallink will not leave Isabella red, because red is and has always been and always will be Viking Line's uniform colour. I don't think they want people who see Isabelle from far away to immediately think "oh that's some Viking Line ship".

Now there's two major questions in my head. First of them, as mentioned, is the future livery of Isabelle. The other one is curiosity about what is going to happen to Silja Festival. Today my friend wrote to Tallink, asking about her fate. Tallink replied that nothing has been decided yet.

We'll see what happens. I'll keep you updated.