PHOTO: Courtesy Norwegian Cruise Line

Whether you’re a new travel agent or a veteran, it pays to learn everything you can about the cruise products you sell or want to sell. And lucky for you, virtually every cruise line offers a variety of training, whether it’s a live course at a tradeshow, a webinar, or an online program that awards you certification as an expert when successfully completed.

Lisa Long, owner of Luxury Vacations LLC, an Independent Agency of Avoya Travel in Marietta, Ga., has more than a decade of travel-selling experience but finds that continuous training is vital.

“It’s a great way to get an in-depth understanding of the product,” Long says. “It gives me the information I need to answer clients’ questions as they come up, it gives me an understanding of what they’re going to experience, and it gives me more information than what they find on the Internet, and so I add value to the customer.”

Joni Gitlin, a travel consultant with Altour in Los Angeles, has sailed on practically every cruise line over the past 25 years, yet she still keeps up on training.

“I do it to keep up-to-date, so that I know all the new things that are coming out and all the new ships,” says Gitlin. “Every time I do a webinar, there’s always something new to learn or reinforce what I already know.”

Even if a new cruise ship is a structurally identical sister, it might have a different décor or new features. “Each new ship has new features or the cruise lines themselves change what is all-inclusive, for example. It might have been different a year ago, so in order to keep up-to-date and give proper information to our clients, we do need to take training.”

Education takes many forms. For big brick-and-mortar agencies, the cruise line representatives might come into the office for a training session. Those who work at home can get training at tradeshows, through webinars (seminars conducted via the Internet) or through online training.

Long learns from regular webinars offered by Avoya, but she has also completed online specialist training by river cruise companies Uniworld and AmaWaterways, as well as by luxury lines Crystal Cruises and Regent Seven Seas.

“The thing I like most is the flexibility,” she says. “I can do the online program on my own time. Most of them also let you stop and start, so you can take a couple of modules now and take a couple more later on. You can take everything at the same time if you want or you can space it out and do it when it’s convenient for you.”

Yet even agents who have achieved certification go back and take the online training again.

“I’ll even retake some of the product certifications because it keeps me up-to-date,” Long says. “There might be changes in the product or new itineraries, so it keeps me fresh and also reinforces things I might not have thought about.”

For example, Long likes selling river cruises, but that segment is changing very fast as new ships enter service and policies change. “I do a lot of river cruises, and river cruising right now is very, very popular,” she says. “There are always new ships and new itineraries coming out or changes in policy and what they include in the fares. Things are constantly changing, and so it’s good to keep doing training.”

It also helps her contrast and compare river cruise ships, she said, as well as explain the differences between a mainstream ocean cruise and river products. “There are a lot of differences, from the size and even how they go into port,” she said.

Carrie Bieber, manager at Strictly Vacations in Santa Barbara, Calif., is a very experienced cruise consultant in an upscale brick-and-mortar agency. Yet she recently completed Windstar Cruises’ new online training course, Windstar Academy, because the company is expanding with the acquisition of three small yachts from Seabourn.

“Normally if the training is by a cruise line that we frequently sell, we don’t learn too much as we keep up with the promotions, new brochures, sales calls from the reps, etc. But because of the new ships coming from Seabourn and the new itineraries, I found this particular survey to be helpful even though I’ve sailed on Windstar twice,” Bieber says.

Many programs are geared to newbies and it would be nice to see more in-depth training for experienced agents familiar with the cruise line. “It’s almost like they need different levels of training,” Beiber says.

But it’s all worth it in the end, agents say.

“Various programs have incentives and usually bonus commissions or something like that,” Bieber says. “Of course, that makes them more worthwhile.”

Certification as an expert is helpful in marketing, too. “For me, it gives me the information, so it helps me answer questions and have a greater understanding of the product,” Long says. “For the customer, if they see the certification, it will give them more confidence in my ability to choose the right product for them.”

And knowledge and professionalism is what it’s all about. “You don’t want to give incorrect information to the clients,” Gitlin says. “They need us because of our knowledge. If we don’t have the knowledge, they don’t need us. We need to stay ahead of what the general public knows.”