Scroll down for video
Royal Caribbean is restructuring its Club Rewards agent loyalty programme by increasing the incentives paid on bookings for the first time in the four years since its inception.
Instead of paying £5 per booking, from today (October 1), the line will pay £5 on all interior and ocean view bookings, £7.50 on all balcony cabin bookings and £10 on every suite booking.
Furthermore, it will double the payments across all tiers for bookings to the Caribbean.
UK & Ireland interim sales director Stuart Byron said: “We are driving agents to try and upsell to higher grades of accommodation.”
Ben Bouldin, UK & Ireland managing director, added: “We are doubling our rewards payments across all three bands for any bookings to the Caribbean.
“We are called ‘Royal Caribbean’– but so little of our UK business goes to the Caribbean. It’s not even a case that we want to over-index to that destination. We are currently under-indexing and we want to make sure that from now on we have our fair share of the Caribbean,” he said.
Bouldin pointed out that Royal has four of its new Oasis Class ships now sailing in the Caribbean, so could offer some of the best ‘hardware’ in the region.
He said: “We have spent a lot of time focusing on ex-UK and Europe which has sold really well but the opportunity now for us, for exponential growth, is the Caribbean, Alaska and Asia.”
Byron added: “Ex-UK is a huge part of our business, but further afield is where we have identified that there is a lot of opportunity from a UK perspective. The Caribbean is way more important to new-to-cruise customers for example, and they also want to be in higher-end accommodation in these places, so we want to unlock that opportunity.
“We have been looking at what are the right marketing messages, who the target market is and who are the right trade partners to help us with this – and enhancing our Club Rewards is part of this.”
In addition, Royal Caribbean has increased the amount of holiday cash back for agents booking a cruise for themselves and bonuses received on their birthday.
Blue tier members will now receive £100, gold tier members will take £200 on holiday and platinum tier members will get £300, when they book a Royal Caribbean cruise for themselves.
Every birthday, blue tier members will get £10, gold tier members and platinum tier members will both £25.
To earn the birthday cash they must have booked a cruise with the line in the last six months.
Agents qualify to blue tier, gold tier or platinum tier membership depending on how many cruises they have booked.