Cruise lines must share information with agents more quickly if they want to boost sales, according to World Travel Holdings (WTH UK) managing director Alison Earnshaw.
Agents often receive news on campaign or ship launches after the fact, meaning they are on the backfoot when they try to make sales, Earnshaw (pictured) told a Travel Weekly webcast.
She urged cruise lines to work with agents and provide them with updates ahead of time so they can answer customers’ questions instantly and avoid a lengthy wait for information.
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“Customers don’t want to wait for information and we’re on the frontline so we need to be able to answer questions with information at our fingertips,” she said.
“Cruise lines should provide access to information as early as possible because sometimes we can’t maximise a campaign or a launch because we only just got the data 10 minutes after it went on sale, and we could have done so much with it if we’d known it was coming.
“There are customers who absolutely want to be the first to book on a new ship or first to book on a new season so the more information we’ve got to enable us to get that data to the customer so they’re further down the booking funnel the more sales we’ll get.”
Earnshaw went on to say some cruise lines continue to have long call wait times, leaving agents stuck as they cannot answer customer enquiries.
“I wouldn’t say we’re wholly out of the other side from the challenges of the pandemic where there were long wait times to get through to some cruise lines,” she said.
“With a couple of cruise lines we might be waiting in excess of an hour to get through and the customer doesn’t understand why that is the case, and we’ve got to fix that.”