During February, both the exterior and the interior of the subway shuttle, which runs from Times Square to Grand Central Station, has been decked out to appear like a Royal Caribbean ship.

The cruise line is calling it the Royal Shuttle.

And, Royal Caribbean International has created a photo album on its Facebook page and has asked fans to upload photos of the shuttle and to tweet them to @RoyalCaribbean, with the hashtag #RoyalShuttle. Here are a few of the images:

Where else can you step off your stateroom balcony right into Grand Central Station?

The marketing blitz comes at a sensitive time for Royal Caribbean, which like Carnival Corp., has seen cruise bookings plunge over the last few weeks because of the Costa Concordia disaster.

Costa is a Carnival brand, but it has hurt bookings for Royal Caribbean and other lines nonetheless.

While booking volumes for Royal Caribbean have declined “by low to mid-teen percentages” in North America, Royal Caribbean says, the drop-off in European bookings has been “higher.”

Royal Caribbean attributes booking declines in Europe, which “vary significantly by country,” to extensive media coverage in the region about the tragedy off the Italian coast.

The fallout from the January 13 Costa Concordia accident occurs during Wave Season, the busiest time of the year for the cruise industry.

Many cruise lines and travel agencies curtailed marketing immediately after the incident, but now they are getting back into gear.

The iPad app enables you to track a ship and receive updates, and showcases itineraries, route maps, port photos and re-sizable deck plans from 30 cruise lines, along with the Revelex-powered ability to book 13 of them.

Most iPad users access the app for dreaming and planning, but still call to book, although Cruise Finder provides booking capabilities for Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Azamara, Carnival, Norwegian Cruise Line, Disney Cruise, Holland America, Princess, Seabourn, Crystal, Cunard, MSC Cruises and Costa Cruises, says Uf Tukel, founder and co-president of parent company WMPH Vacations.

iCruise, which has no ties to Apple and its patent activities, has had iPhone and Android apps on the market for some time, but wanted to introduce an iPad app to take advantage of Wave Season’s booking windfall.

“We wanted to harness as much as we could from our website and smartphone apps,” Tukel says. “However, most of those images weren’t optimized for iPad. As a result, we had to create over 20,000 new images that would present well on multiple platforms.”

In addition, iCruise coders had a complex task in adequately rendering deck plans given the iPad’s “pinch and zoom functionality,” Tukel adds.

In addition to free iPhone, iPad and Android apps, iCruise.com has a mobile website.

And, a Kindle Fire version of Cruise Finder is in the works and slated for introduction by the end of the first quarter.

However, by that time Wave Season will have just about sailed.

CCL says the price increase will vary by sailing date, and will top out at 5%.

Carnival President and CEO Gerry Cahill says even with the increases, the cruise line’s pricing won’t get back to 2008 levels.

Cahill attributes the record reservations during the wave season to travel agent support, targeted marketing initiatives, itinerary tweaks and departures from ports close to cruisers’ homes.

The report of record wave-seasons bookings for Carnival coincides with — and gives additional credence to — a comScore report showing Carnival Cruise Lines’ unique visitors in January increased 79% to 2.2 million.

Carnival’s surge took place as it implemented on Jan. 1 a new trademarks’ policy, which prohibited CCL’s travel agency partners from keyword bidding on the cruise line’s many trademarks. It is difficult to assess how significant a role the new policy played in Carnival’s record wave-season bookings or in the website-traffic uptick, but it is doubtful that it was an overriding factor because the policy took at least a couple of weeks to kick into gear.

comScore found that the ground-transportation category, including the Amtrak rail line and cruise sites CCL, VacationsToGo and Royal Caribbean, was among the fastest-growing sectors in January. Actually, tax-oriented websites was the fastest-growing category in anticipation of the April 15 tax-filing deadline.

The travel ground-cruise category saw a 30% traffic increase from December to January, according to comScore. VacationsToGo websites led the ground-cruise category with with 2.5 million January unique visitors, a jump of 62 percent.

Amtrak was #2 in the category, increasing unique visitors 13% to 2.3 million in January.

Carnival, with its 2.2 million visitors was third, following by Royal Caribbean Cruises with 1.5 million visitors, up 54%.

Two other travel categories — hotels/resorts and online travel agents — were among the top-growing sub-categories in travel, comScore says.

The hotels/resorts category grew 23% in January to 34.1 million unique visitors and online travel agents climbed 19% to 42.5 million unique visitors.

The ground-cruise category, with its 14 million unique visitors, is a relatively small travel category when measured against the much larger OTA and hotel categories, reflecting the high percentage of phone bookings that take place in ground-cruise.

And, there was one travel website — Travelocity — among comScore’s Top 10 Gaining Properties by Percentage Change in Unique Visitors in January.

comScore says Travelocity’s unique visitors in January grew 38% to 10.1 million.

That put Travelocity as the fifth fastest-growing Web property in January, according to comScore.