PHOTO: Cruise Planners’ executive team includes Tom Kruszewski, CFO and co-owner; Vicky Garcia COO and co-owner; Michelle Fee, CEO and co-founder; and Brian Shultz, executive vice president, technology and operations.

Many years ago, Cruise Planners adopted “green” as its official company color. Indeed, its annual conventions are usually a sea of “green,” including the most recent one held Nov. 12-15 at the Borgata casino resort in Atlantic City, N.J. Most of the 500 travel franchise owners in attendance, as well as all of the Cruise Planners executive team, showed their allegiance by wearing something green.

The Coral Springs, Fla.-headquartered host agency, an American Express representative, now boasts that it is the largest home-based travel agent franchise network. It’s also one of the few major hosts that can access American Express’ full slate of marketing and sales programs, including the Pay with Points program, where customers can pay for travel with points earned on their American Express cards.

This year, Cruise Planners is celebrating 20 years in business by reporting strong sales results and unveiling major initiatives in technology, marketing and training to help its more than 900 franchisees achieve even greater profits. Indeed, Michelle Fee, Cruise Planners CEO and co-founder, boasts that her group will eclipse its competitors in the host agency market. “Our goal is to have total domination of the home-based travel industry where Cruise Planners is the only name your customer will know,” she told her franchisee delegates.

Fee says Cruise Planners has spent the past year investing in its headquarters team and adding to staff so it can truly be an extension of its franchisees to help them grow their business. “We have invested internally in all aspects of the company so each of our travel advisors have the back-end support of a 65-person team focusing on marketing, technology, training and strategic development,” she says.

Cruise Planners also has been beefing up its technology, training and marketing programs to boost sales in all categories of travel. “We have been building the technology and beefing up our in-house support so each CP travel advisor can efficiently work on growing his or her business and focus on selling,” Fee said. “We do all the heavy lifting in the background in an effort to support each franchise.”

Those investments in new programs and technology are paying off big time. So here’s why you might want to join Big Green.

PHOTO: Sea of Green: Cruise Planners agents show their loyalty during the group’s annual conference.

Be part of a group that is reporting strong results. Fee and her team unveiled new results showing that the average Cruise Planners franchisee grew by 26 percent based on cruise departures in 2014. In addition, Cruise Planners is projecting a 44 percent increase in bookings for 2015 based on front-loaded revenues.

Join a host that is growing beyond just selling cruises. Cruise Planners also has been diversifying the sales mix that its franchisees produce. While those franchises still predominately sell cruises (71 percent), land is now at 20 percent, travel insurance is at 5 percent, and air, car and hotel are at 5 percent, according to the company’s latest figures for 2014.

Indeed, some Cruise Planners executives say the group will be selling 50 percent cruises and 50 percent land tours, hotels and other products within the next five years.

Get access to a new associates program for franchisees. Cruise Planners is focusing on beefing up its associates program for franchisees. Associates are effectively independent contractors affiliated directly with a Cruise Planners franchisee.

In fact, Cruise Planners says those franchisees with associates had three times the revenue as those running their business alone. Those who added associates increased revenues by 27 percent. The new Cruise Planners associates program will allow associates to participate in the company’s marketing campaigns and provide them with access to more tools to help drive sales.

Get better mobile technology to connect with customers. Cruise Planners has launched a new Mobile 2.0 for its Cruise Planners app, which can be used by customers of franchisees to book cruises and communicate with their Cruise Planners travel advisors.

With the revamped app, which is currently live, Cruise Planners can push out notifications and sales promotions with strong calls to action to the individual Cruise Planners franchisee.

Get better targeted marketing through a new Smart Select tool. Cruise Planners’ brand-new Smart Select program allows travel advisors to automatically identify clients within their databases for specific targeted marketing campaigns that will maximize efficiency and make the best use of each advisor’s marketing dollars.

Cruise Planners’ home office will now automatically segment those customers into specific groups based on purchasing habits, demographics and other factors.

Since launching Smart Select in June, Cruise Planners says it has seen the program increase sales by double-digits for its franchisees.

Get better individual Cruise Planners websites overall. Cruise Planners already manages thousands of pages of web content for each of its franchisees’ websites. New and improved websites will now allow customers to search for both land and cruise vacations from one spot. They also feature better displays of current deals offered by Cruise Planners franchisees, an improved search box, and new “buttons” dedicated to land vacations, as well as tickets and events.

Improve the visibility of your Cruise Planners website. Since this summer Cruise Planners has focused on improving search engine optimization for the individual websites of its franchisees.

According to the company, that has already resulted in a 113 percent increase in traffic to those websites. Cruise Planners has plans to continue to expand the program to help drive even more consumer traffic to each franchisee’s website.

Get access to a new client management tool. Cruise Planners has just introduced CP Hub, a client prospecting management tool that helps franchisees better qualify clients, price products, follow up with clients and book their customers.

The new tool is focused on helping franchisees stay on top of their customer prospects by sending email reminders about all sales opportunities. The tool also helps them better track, monitor, forecast and manage sales and prospective sales.

Book more hotels using a new reservations system. A new hotel reservations system powered by Orbitz has been to Cruise Planners’ eConnect booking platform. Commissions earned on these hotel sales are sent directly to Cruise Planners’ home office, which will then distribute them to franchisees. The new system will allow Cruise Planners to expedite commission.

Sell more travel using a new triggered email program. Under this new program, when Cruise Planners’ customers book a trip, they will get a series of emails designed as automatic touch points throughout the booking cycle. The idea is to give clients personalized attention from their travel advisor automatically at each stage of the booking process.

Get access to more social media training. Cruise Planners has turned to social media expert Sophie Bujold, who knows the travel business, to develop a new social media training program starting in January. Bujold will provide quarterly sessions to coach franchisees on how to better use social media in their marketing and client acquisitions.

“All of our proprietary technology tools are designed to help Cruise Planners travel advisors work smarter, not harder,” says Vicky Garcia, Cruise Planners’ chief operating officer and co-owner. “We have invested a lot into our technology, and it is truly paying off.”