According to an article published on the Travel Market Report website, Jan Swartz, Executive Vice President - Marketing & Sales for Cunard and Princess, states that cruise lines wouldn't have to spend so much time engaging in direct marketing practices like printed flyers and targeted emails if travel agents spent more time generating demand for their products.
A comment not likely to thrill most travel agents.
On the surface, Swartz is correct: if the burden of marketing and promoting cruises was placed on the shoulders of travel agents, lines wouldn't have to spend the amount of money they do reaching out to consumers via more traditional methods.
The problem lies in the fact that travel agencies just aren't structured that way - nor should they be.
Very few travel resellers focus exclusively on cruises, which means not only do they have well over a dozen lines that need promoting, but the endless myriad of all-inclusive resorts, golf retreats, and airlines would have to be heavily promoted as well. Naturally, each company wants its product to have top billing, which means you're now trying to get a travel agent to promote one of perhaps over a hundred different companies at any given time.
It just doesn't work.
The article points out that in Swartz's conversations with travel agents, they admit most of their bookings come from a) existing clients or b) word of mouth referrals. Swartz suggested a targeted marketing plan, developed and executed solely at the agency level, would work better. Not for the agency, of course - for Cunard and Princess.
In the end, the comments come off as unusually critical for the normally amiable Swartz. To put the onus for marketing multi-billion-dollar companies on the shoulders of travel agencies who's profits don't approach anything near that level is strange at best - but it does speak to a larger problem.
How do you attract customers? And how do you get them to keep booking with you? Non-traditional marketing methods may be the answer.
Very few cruise lines utilize on-line and interactive resources like blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages to their full potential. With the exception of John Heald's fantastic blog as Carnival Cruise Line's Senior Cruise Director, most blogs put out by lines simply re-hash press releases. Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts might offer a little more dimension, but these act mainly as another tool for viewing news and press releases.
How do you get someone to cruise with you? First, you have to get them excited. Once you have them excited, the rest falls into place. It's very difficult on a printed flyer to get someone excited about a cruise - unless the price is astoundingly good. Usually, there's a date, an itinerary, a ship, and a price. Nothing else. Compounding that is the fact that many flyers are simply out-of-date by the time they reach prospective cruisers.
Online methods offer a more immediate and information-rich approach.
Is there more that can be done to create a better balance between travel agencies and cruise lines? Of course. As Swartz states, at the end of the day, it's all about filling the ships.
Placing the onus on travel agents, however, might not be a step forward.
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