This year, Cruise Holidays International celebrates its 30th year in business. With franchisees in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, Cruise Holidays is a unit of Travel Leaders Group. It is the oldest and largest cruise franchisor in existence.
We sat down with Kevin Weisner, Cruise Holidays senior vice president, to talk about the company's evolution, the pluses of owning a franchise and the greatest challenge facing the travel advisor community.
When did Cruise Holidays open and how has it evolved and changed over the years?
It was started 30 years ago, a fact that served as our theme for the May convention in New Orleans - the Big Three-Oh in the Big Easy. In 1984 it was such a different world in many ways. Cruise Holidays was the first franchise organization that really was cruise focused. I don't think there were any other brands out there other than individual agencies that were really cruise oriented.
When you think about 1984, in the cruise space from a distribution point of view, there was probably a lot of less competition. But I also think the flip side of that is there was a whole lot less awareness of cruising. So the market was still really small.
I think back in the mid 80s CLIA's number was like 3 percent of the U.S. population had ever taken a cruise. It was pretty small.
So in 1984 you had little competition and little awareness. There was no Internet. There was really no direct to consumer business. Compared to other things, the yields were pretty high, and you had a pretty low cost structure to open a cruise-only agency.
It was a pretty modest proposition.
Obviously the challenge back then was to really educate the consumer. So you weren't just selling product back then. You were selling the entire concept of a cruise.
There are still a lot of folks who have never taken a cruise who really need to understand what it is and be educated. Some perceptions still need to be corrected and broken down.
But to succeed today it's a little less about educating consumers about product and more about providing a really extraordinary and differentiated service experience. And I think that's what our product is at Cruise Holidays.
I'm a big believer in being anticipatory, thinking through things on behalf of your consumer to make sure that you're telling them answers to questions that would never occur to them to ask.
We're putting a lot of training and communication emphasis on the fact that our role here is certainly to facilitate the purchase - but it's also to really educate and demonstrate a level of care that's unusual in this day and age.
What are the plusses for agents looking for a franchise agreement?
I think the plusses are fairly universal. In this day and age I think it's really impractical getting into travel on your own. What are all the things I would need to do to be business ready? I've got to get access to some kind of operating system. I'm going to have to create a Web site. I'm going to have to create my own marketing materials and essentially create my own brand. I'm going to have to learn everything on my own. I'm going to have to keep on top of all the information out there on my own.
I'm going to need to figure out how to assess my business from a performance and reporting point of view. I just think the idea of doing all that on your own - even if you have the will to do it and the time to do it - can't be done efficiently from a cost point of view.
These things can get pretty expensive pretty fast. So looking at a franchise that provides a full solution to a lot of different things ultimately becomes an economic decision -- and a good economic decision.
AgentMate, which is our point of sale system, is a huge efficiency tool for agents in terms of managing the business, doing all the accounting, reporting analysis, payroll processing, and performance assessments. I don't subscribe to the idea that everything we do is wholly needed by every single one of our members. But I think we do enough things within the membership that people find the greatest benefit for themselves, if you will.
What are the benefits of owning a Cruise Holidays franchise?
When a person receives an email or an offer from us they can click on the link and get directly to that information. If it's a piece of direct mail they can actually put in the promo code right on the home page and it will take them to the details for that offer. That process really happens in what I'm going to call a no touch fashion for our owners.
In other words the agent does not have to lift a finger for that to happen. For example, if we're doing a particular tactical promotion with Regent Seven Seas Cruises on behalf of our agencies we're able to go in and find all of those customers globally if you will, who have either taken a Regent Seven Seas cruise in the past or have expressed an overt interest in that. Then we provide them with that particular tactical promotion, whether it's email or direct mail. And again this happens completely without anyone other than us at headquarters having to lift a finger.
This year, we've added more visibility onto the AgentMate dashboard for quicker access to promotions. In the past we always had that information available to the owners and agents via an email and/or our intranet site, but now we've put it into AgentMate because it's really become the nexus of the most important information that's going to affect their day.
One of the things that we've learned is every time we introduce a new platform or new technology it frankly is introducing a bit of a burden on people. They have to learn how to make that thing work in conjunction with everything else they've got going on. And so we really look at AgentMate not as more software, we look at it as software that's doing more.
People are in AgentMate all day long. It's where you start your day - whether it's final payments you need to collect, a deposit that's coming due or a follow-up call from a customer who maybe you did a quote for. That all comes up in your dashboard. And then right there is where we've got our marketing alerts and our promotional alerts. It's that idea of convergence. You don't have to look somewhere else. It's just there where people already are.
What is the greatest challenge facingthe travel advisor community and do you have a recommended course of action?
A lot of consumers still do not understand what a travel agent does for them. I know that sounds sort of old school. But I still think that's a perennial challenge out there. It may even be a bigger challenge today that it was 30 years ago when I got into the business.
Because we do have access to information and booking tools via the Internet, that emboldens and engenders a do it yourself mentality.
We introduced a new mission statement this year at convention and it really is all about that service orientation and making every customer feel like their vacation is the only one you care about - because frankly it's the only one they care about.
Everybody in our industry needs to be pretty overt in telling customers what we do. I think we need to be a little less passive and a little bit more active and tell the customers, look, I don't know if you've worked with a travel agent before but here's how I work and here are the things that I'm going to do for you - and really lay it out there for them.
Create a clear expectation of what success looks like and what a good travel planner does for you. And then fulfill on that expectation.
What advice do you have for cruise agents just starting out in the travel industry?
Don't be timid. There's maybe some insecurity about having to learn and know so much and getting what I call those challenge questions. Have you been on this ship? Have you been to this destination? And if you're fresh to the industry those kind of questions might make you get into a defensive posture.
I think that you need to be unapologetic and strong and confident right from the get go.
We all have to start somewhere in our lives at some time. We're in a retail industry. People are loyal to you because you're doing something for them that they consider really valuable. Go after customers who will appreciate what you do for them.
What I mean by that is don't get into the scrum trying to battle it out for the lowest common denominator, i.e., discounting and low-priced shoppers. There's a certain element of the consumer demographic that will never see value no matter how hard you work for them. Initially it's very difficult to consider the idea of walking away from a customer but at the end of the day there's a finite amount of time and energy that you can put into it. You really want to focus on those customers who value being served.
Aim high from the start.
For the latest travel news, updates and deals, subscribe to the daily TravelPulse newsletter.
Topics From This Article to Explore
