Former cruise line employee Daniel Thomas tells Ella Sagar about setting up his luxury cruise agency this year – and getting his mum on board too
Q. How did you first get into cruises?
I went on my first cruise at the age of four on a family holiday. It was a Disney cruise out of Florida. That’s what sowed the seed. We then went on a cruise on different lines every year and that’s how my knowledge and passion developed. I now call myself a self-confessed cruise nerd. I grew up in Winchester, which is only about 20 minutes from Southampton, so I always used to go down and see the ships.
Q. How did your career in the cruise industry start?
I turned my passion into a career. From the age of 17, I started working part-time for Carnival UK in their call centre at weekends while I was still in college. It was a fantastic experience, being thrown in at the deep end. I absolutely loved it.
At 18 I took part in the Carnival secondment programme where you can try going on ships for two months to see how you feel about a life at sea. I just fell in love with it and ended up doing two secondments, then continued my part-time job while I went to university. Everyone used to make fun of me because my favourite days on board were turnover days, which can be really stressful, but I find it amazing to see the logistical side of things on a cruise ship.
People care more about thoughtful additional touches, especially in luxury, where you are not dealing with people who value their money but value their time
Q. Tell me more about the cruises you worked on.
I went on to work on ships at P&O Cruises, Cunard and Azamara Cruises before the ‘P-word’ entered our lives in 2020. It was very tough. We were stuck in South America for a little while before everyone got home, and then I didn’t have a job because everyone was furloughed or made redundant. Royal Caribbean then reached out and asked whether I would like to help them run a project to overhaul their muster drill process, and after that I went to Celebrity Cruises as a guest relations director, which was an eye-opening experience. In 2023, I went over to the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection as a hotel manager.
Q. What did you learn from all these experiences?
I learnt that anything can happen while on holiday with any client, but as long as you approach it in a relaxed and jovial way, everything’s going to be OK. Also, people care more about thoughtful additional touches, especially in luxury, where you are not dealing with people who value their money but value their time. For instance, one day I had a couple on their honeymoon on board who wanted to watch Iowa State’s netball match as the woman used to play for them. I placed Iowa State flags around the TV and put flowers and a bottle of champagne in the room. The next day all they talked about were the flags – they didn’t particularly care about the flowers or champagne.
Q. Why did you decide to leave cruise lines behind and set up an agency?
I had the idea in the pandemic. I decided to set up Fraser Campbell Travel with the purpose of delivering the ‘wow’ experience that clients have on cruises and bring as much of that into their holiday experience as possible, from the moment they pick up the phone to various points throughout their journey with us.
Q. What plans do you have for your agency?
We really want to get to know our clients on a one-to-one basis and offer thoughtful touches and a bespoke, natural service throughout the client journey. The plan is to introduce clients very slowly as we bring our systems and processes online. The most important thing for me in this whole journey is our client service levels. I want to keep a 100 Net Promoter Score.
Q. What trends are you currently seeing?
Longer voyages for celebrations are proving popular for a lot of clients, whether it’s for birthdays or retirements. These clients are looking to have a luxury experience on a premium luxury line around the 30 to 50-day mark. These bookings are usually a few years down the line. In the next 18 months, there is a lot of interest in Mediterranean fly-cruising.
What’s it like working with your mum?
Fraser Campbell Travel is a family-run business as my mum has joined me at the company. I have done more than 50 cruises as a guest and she has done over 120, which is a bit outrageous! With our combined experience, we talk about cruises a lot and I think we bore people to tears with it all the time. It is great to combine the two perspectives: one of her as a guest, and then me as the operational person. Having her on board is amazing, and I am really happy she has agreed to come along on this journey. She has a lot of clients and potential clients she knows well too.
What we want at the start is to work mainly online from home and to repurpose what we would have as an office space, and as we slowly start to scale up, we could potentially look at an office. The name for the agency comes from my middle names, so you could say it is a little bit of a vanity project. I wanted something which completely stands out, and I really did not want to have the words cruising, cruises or luxury in it. I want the agency to be different!