CruiseOne's new Dream Vacations brand, introduced at its annual conference recently aboard the Norwegian Escape, is aimed at sending customers the message that CruiseOne home-based travel agencies sell more than cruises.

Many CruiseOne franchisees also do a significant amount of business in vacation packages, tours and resorts. As Senior Vice President Debbie Fiorino pointed out, land sales by CruiseOne and its sister network Cruises Inc., rose by 25 percent this year over 2014.

Franchisees can stay with the CruiseOne brand name or adopt the Dream Vacations brand.

Specializing – whether in a specific special-interest niche or a destination or even a particular style of travel – is perceived as a wise business decision for travel agents among many in the industry. Countless sessions at agent conferences, along with webinars and other educational forums, focus on the advantages of this strategy.

“Better to know a lot about a little, then a little about a lot,” the saying goes. But there are dissenting viewpoints.

Serving clients well is a specialty in itself, and what matters above all, this reasoning goes. And while there are many clients who, for instance, take a cruise year after year, there are also clients who want to mix it up — taking a cruise one year, a tour another year, an all-inclusive resort stay yet another year.

An agency, especially one with a healthy base of repeat clients, will want to be able to sell a wide variety of travel. By focusing too narrowly on one area, agents may be losing out on these clients’ preference for diverse travel experiences.

It looks like CruiseOne’s new Dream Vacations brand validates those doubts about specializing.

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