Jeff Drew: A Life Selling Cruises

A few weeks back I got a call from an American Queen Steamboat Company spokesman who said my old friend Jeff Drew, CTC, who is senior vice president of sales for the company, was retiring effective May 1 at the early age of 60.

Jeff’s move comes just as American Queen is introducing a new ship, American Empress, which debuts this week on the Columbia and Snake Rivers in Oregon, but he’s planning on being on hand when the revamped vessel is rechristened.

In an interview last month, I asked Jeff about his plans were for the future and we reviewed his almost incredible career path in the travel industry. The first thing he told me was he’s actually not retiring, but plans to refocus his life around several other pursuits.

First, he wants to mentor inner city kids in his hometown of St. Louis, a laudable effort to give back to his community. He also wants to keep up with his travel industry life by going on the speaker circuit at conferences. Indeed, he’s already lined up a speaking gig at Ensemble Travel Group’s October conference—and he’s looking for other engagements.

Finally, he wants to take some courses at Washington University in St. Louis. So he maintains he’s not retiring, just stepping back to enjoy life a bit and see what the next phase will be.

Now I’ve known Jeff since the early 1990s. In fact, he was one of the first cruise executives I ever interviewed and I also met with him often on the travel conference circuit for the past two decades. I’ve even introduced him a few times as a speaker at industry conferences.

Indeed, Jeff gets the biggest laughs on the speaker circuit for his speeches, one of which, “Till Death Do Us Part,” on the niche selling cruise potential in the divorce market, is truly a fall-off-your-chair session for those of us who have seen it. Believe me, if you’re a speaker at industry events, as I am, you absolutely don’t want to follow Jeff on the program.

Of course, Jeff is more than just a great speaker. He has been a highly successful and creative salesman for cruising and other travel products for 35 years. He’s also been part of the incredible growth of cruising for the same period of time.

In fact, if you look at Jeff’s career he very much mirrors the evolution of cruising, if not the travel industry itself. In the late 1970s, he began working for Maritz Travel, which handled incentive travel for many of the big Fortune 500 companies. He got that job in a very innovative way: He posed as a pizza delivery man to get in ahead of the line of applicants for the post because he had tickets to go see his beloved St. Louis Cardinals. He got the job and he saw the game.

That first job also exposed him to the legendary travel agents Bill and Jim Maritz. And when he left Maritz to move from St. Louis to Boulder, Colo., it was Bill who helped him get a job with Lakewood Travel in that city. He handled incentive travel for Coors Brewery, which helped him transition over to what became his main career in cruise sales.

After just a couple of years in Boulder working as a travel agent, Jeff got a call from the late Bill Leiber, who asked him to join Norwegian Cruise Line as a sales representative working out of Boulder and overseeing the company’s number two market in the country. Between 1981 and 1986, Jeff built up a strong business selling charter cruises out of Salt Lake City and eventually was promoted to director of sales for the West Coast. “NCL made my name in the cruise industry,” he says.

In 1986, however, Jeff decided to try the tour business for a while, joining Classic Hawaii, then run by Larry Pimentel. Bob Joselyn, the well-known travel agency consultant, who owned a travel agency at the time, had introduced Jeff to Larry because he was impressed by Jeff’s creative sales techniques. For example, Jeff says he would dress up in a scuba outfit to promote Norwegian’s “dive in” sales campaign — and that was a relatively tame stunt to get more sales.

According to Jeff, Pimentel also was largely responsible for Jeff’s success as a public speaker.

“Larry gave me my big break… he allowed me to speak for Classic at conferences,” Jeff says. “That’s how I learned I had to be really funny and different, because I was going to get killed if people expected Larry to speak and they got me. That really helped me get on the map.”

When Pimentel wanted to move into the cruise business, it was Jeff who helped to put him on a panel with Bob Dickinson, then president of Carnival Cruise Lines. Dickinson was sufficiently impressed with Larry, according to Jeff, that he very quickly became a candidate to become president of Seabourn Cruise Line when Carnival Corp. purchased the luxury line in 1992.

And when Pimentel moved to Seabourn as president, Jeff went with him, giving Jeff his first experience in luxury cruise sales. Jeff also ended up speaking at road shows throughout the country to promote Seabourn’s luxury cruise product. Indeed, Seabourn even charged agents $25 each for such seminars and Larry and Jeff spoke to packed houses.

Jeff also got the chance to work with the legendary Warren Titus, one of the “fathers” of luxury cruising who was still chairman at Seabourn.

“To me he was the George Clooney of the industry,” Jeff says. “He was as handsome as you could get and such a gentleman.”

When Jeff would bring in the week’s sales numbers, which in the beginning were not always good, Titus, a San Francisco 49ers fan, would stop him before he spoke.

“He would say to me ‘don't say a word to me unless you can work Jerry Rice and Joe Montana into the conversation,’” Jeff says. “He was brilliant but he had a sense of humor and he loved the 49ers.”

Jeff also was responsible for bringing in Bill Leiber to Seabourn since he had worked with him earlier at Norwegian.

“Larry and Bill became a famous tandem, but they wouldn’t have known each other if I hadn’t brought Bill in,” Jeff says.

When Carnival Corp. purchased Cunard and merged it with Seabourn, Pimentel was named to oversee the combined company and Jeff went with him to Miami. He continued with Cunard-Seabourn when Pimentel left and Pam Conover took over, helping to launch the Queen Mary 2.

But then Jeff’s father took ill in St. Louis and Jeff decided he needed to find a job that was closer to home. He left Miami even before finding another job and moved back to St. Louis.

Jeff caught a break when his friend John Severini, another veteran cruise executive, told him about a job he’d been interviewing for at Intrav, which offered small ship and riverboat cruising and had just been purchased by Swiss travel giant Kuoni.

Severini didn’t want to move to St. Louis, but told Jeff to interview for the post and he got it. He was with Intrav from 2000 to 2003, but the company struggled with the effects of the Concorde crash and 9/11. Nevertheless, Jeff got his first exposure to the growing river cruise business.

Later in 2003, Jeff heard about another cruise sales job from David Morris, yet another friend who is a veteran cruise executive. Joe Waters and Frank Del Rio were starting up a new high-premium line called Oceania Cruises using some of the ships from bankrupt Renaissance Cruises.

“Frank and I had lunch together and Frank asked me some baseball questions that I could answer,” Jeff says. “Frank told me he was going to bring me on but I had to promise to to hire the very best sales people in the business.”

Jeff was then hired as senior vice president of sales and proceeded to form what he calls his own “dirty dozen” for Oceania, and the new line was off to the races.

For Jeff, one of the best things was he could run his Oceania sales team from his St. Louis home. He spent nine years with Oceania and saw the line add two new ships.  He also credits Del Rio for building a brilliant team in sales and marketing that essentially created a new cruise company from scratch and got travel agents to sell it.

In 2012 a new executive team was brought in to run Oceania, although Del Rio continued as chairman. And that team wanted to have its top sales executive in Miami, not St. Louis. So Jeff knew he had to make another career move.

Because he had a non-compete in his contract, he was limited in the companies he could work for, but he managed to convince Del Rio to allow him to seek employment with a new river cruise line, American Queen Steamboat Company, even though he wasn’t even sure they had a job for him.

Jeff called Tim Rubacky, then head of marketing for American Queen, and drove down to Memphis for an interview. He was hired to head up sales for the Mississippi river boat company, where he remained until now, even though he confesses he’s really a “blue water” guy who has had very little experience with river cruising.

“American Queen has been so good to me,” Jeff says. “Ted Sykes [American Queen’s president] has totally turned around this company, and John Waggoner, the owner, has the biggest heart I ever worked with. They’ve turned a company that had a loss a year ago into one that is now very profitable.”

As I wrote at the beginning of this column, Jeff’s story effectively mirrors the development of the cruise industry over the past 30 years or more. He started in contemporary (mass-market) cruising, saw the development of a new luxury cruise product, got into the high-premium end of the business just when that was getting popular among consumers and travel agents, and ended in the scorching hot river cruise segment.

“I guess I am the Forrest Gump of this industry in so many ways,” Jeff says. “I just fall into so many great situations. Larry Pimentel once told me that I might not be the brightest bulb in this industry, but that I had great EI, or emotional intelligence. He told me I was good at reading people. I have hired that way for my staff. I look for people who can build on relationships, because it’s a lost art.”

A lost art indeed. And if I know Jeff, he’ll keep all the great relationships he’s had over the years in the travel industry and use them for whatever comes next, whether that’s public speaking or another endeavor. So I won’t say goodbye to Jeff just yet, because I fully expect to see him on the travel industry circuit for years to come. He’s one of those guys who is just lucky and talented enough to be in the right place at the right time.