Agents and cruise bosses discuss the sector at a debate sponsored by Amadeus. Hollie-Rae Merrick reports from Carnival UK’s headquarters
Cruise bosses suggest agents should focus on a few lines
Cruise line bosses would rather agents selling cruise for the first time take time to learn about the lines best suited to their customer base rather than trying to sell everything.
Nick Wilkinson, sales director at Norwegian Cruise Line, encouraged agents to segment the market and work with the most suitable operator partners.
He said: “There is so much out there and if you’re not a cruise specialist then don’t worry about learning everything about every cruise line.
“Agents aren’t expected to know every single hotel, yet they are trying to learn about every cruise line.
“Start small with what you know and grow. We are all trying to do too much.”
His comments came as a Travel Weekly survey revealed 60% of agents polled said they wanted more education
and 42% said they found cruise content complex.
Simone Clark, managing director of Iglu.com and Planet Cruise, agreed and said that when Iglu first started her team had focused on the four biggest lines.
Karen Doyle, newly appointed general manager of commercial relations at Tui Travel, urged lines to make sure learning is structured.
“Cruise is 10% of what our shops would sell,” she said. “And because agents aren’t selling it day in and day out, they probably feel they need more product knowledge.
“Cruise gives the agent community more knowledge and training than any other sector.
“Sometimes there is almost too much and you want to try and contain it to make sure the way agents learn is more structured.”
Doyle said some agents felt less confident when serving a knowledgeable cruise customer and that this could “put them on the back foot”.
Ships are no more complex than ‘floating hotels’
Cruise lines need to work with agents to “demystify” the cruise product and prove it’s not as complex as many assume.
MSC Cruises director Giles Hawke said agents not selling cruise but considering it should regard the ships as “nothing more than a floating hotel”.
“I dispute that its complex – it’s not complex,” he added.
His comments came after Claire Brighton, senior commercial manager at agency consortium Advantage, blamed the plethora of cabin grades and fare types for putting off non-cruise specialist agents.
But Hawke said it was easier than some might suggest.
“It’s a big hotel that goes from destination to destination and you decide if you want a window or not, a balcony or not,” he said.
“At its most basic it is a very simple concept. Then you decide as an agent which partners you will work with. You learn about the lines you’re working with and you decide which level of learning you’d like to achieve.
“It does need to be de-mystified because it’s not complex. It is a floating hotel – that’s as complicated as it is.”
Cruise must be ‘front of mind’ for agents
Cruising needs to be front of mind if agents are to sell holidays at sea to customers who are “indifferent to cruising”, according to a Royal Caribbean International boss.
Stuart Leven said it was important to get cruise on the mind for as many agents as possible but added that agent needed to push cruise to customers other than those who already know about cruising.
“The potential of those customers that are indifferent to cruising is massive,” he said. “They are walking through the doors of travel agents and a large proportion of people selling to them don’t yet have cruise front of mind in their armoury.”
Advantage’s Claire Brighton said it could prove difficult to encourage agents to start selling something new for the first time.
She said the consortium had strategies to encourage agents to embrace the sector more.
Brighton added that the volume of deals pushed out by cruise lines made the task more complicated, but Richard Twynam, of Azamara Club Cruises, claimed improved technology could ease this.
“That’s where technology could play a massive role and cruise lines are trying to make it easier and to simplify things so that prices are live and relevant,” he said.
Thomson’s Karen Doyle said the company had a big focus on cruise and described its exposure as being “actually quite disproportionate” considering the sector accounted for only 10% of the business.
“We have less shops year on year but our cruise sales are up,” she said. However, Doyle said she believed that in general the high street had “softened” and there was a growing pressure to sell more mainstream holidays which could mean that the high street’s share of cruise bookings had fallen.
Paul Ludlow, UK managing director of Princess Cruises, said the industry was a great success story that should be celebrated.
Italian line to promote just five ships in UK
MSC Cruises is to focus on promoting a handful of its ships to the UK market to make selling its itineraries “less daunting” for the trade.
Executive director Giles Hawke said MSC in previous years had come to “hope and expect” that agents would sell all of its ships and destinations.
However, he said: “We are now going to become more focused on a smaller number of ships for the UK and a smaller number of destinations.
“That way we won’t be expecting agents to know the names of 12 ships that don’t roll off the tongue.
“We will look to promote up to five ships to the trade. The specialist cruise agents will probably sell a lot more than that but for those that are less experienced we will be taking away the daunting task of trying to understand it all.”
Comment: From our sponsor
Garry Brown, European cruise lines sales manager, Amadeus IT Group
Crucial to successfully capturing the interest of Brits yet to try a holiday at sea is assisting travel agents to become more confident about selling cruises.
We believe that user-friendly shopping technology is vital to overcoming this challenge.
Amadeus has been working with some of the nation’s biggest and brightest cruise specialists for many years.
Crucially, they know which cruise line is the perfect match for which holidaymaker. But it’s a different story for travel agents that don’t have a local cruise expert.
That’s why we have invested in developing Amadeus Cruise Shop and other user-friendly tools that offer both a fast, professional sales environment and a step-by-step guided mode designed to support a sales conversation and boost conversion.
To us, the best technology is the kind that you don’t have to think twice about.
Because there are so many different cruise products on the market, travel professionals tell us they need the ability to quickly compare like for like – not something easily achieved using a single provider’s website.
So while there’s still much to be done in taking cruise to the general population, we’re working closely with the industry to shape the future of cruise sales.