Navigating Cruise Sales Is Sink or Swim for Travel Advisors
Photo Credit: River cruising, such as a Viking River Cruise, has more commission opportunities for travel advisors than some mass-market sailings do. Flickr / Viking River Cruise
Skift Take
With more cruise choices than ever before, there are plenty of opportunities for travel advisors to boost earnings from cruise sales. Doing so, however, means taking a proactive approach to education and customer service.
These are robust times for the cruise industry, with both passenger demand and ship choices on the rise this year. While this is bringing more opportunity for travel advisors, it also means more complexity in learning about the products and knowing which ones make sense to focus on. Just selling mass-market cruises and only earning commissions on the base fares is no way to achieve profitability, according to cruise sales experts.
Savvy travel advisors are instead concentrating on the upper end of the market, including river cruises, which offer all-inclusive pricing and therefore higher commissions. They're also getting creative in offering clients attractive shore excursion alternatives, private transfers, and pre- and post-cruise options. Along with this, successful advisors are investing time in learning about the products and cultivating good working relationships with cruise-line business development managers.
Now that it's been a few months since the Mexican government
