Cruise Holidays makes it personal

Cruise Holidays is launching a new program that’s designed to help agents keep in touch with their clients in the critical time between when they book a vacation and when they return home as a means of further reinforcing the agent’s value as an end-to-end vacation consultant. The program consists of a series of communications that delves deep into CruiseWeb data to provide highly customized emails based on the client’s itinerary, date of sailing and other key trip information. CruiseWeb is Cruise Holidays’ proprietary technology system, serving as a customer relationship management tool completely integrated with booking and accounting. While Cruise Holidays isn’t saying publicly what the contents of those communications will be exactly, it notes that the program highlights the crucial role that CruiseWeb plays in all owner and agent activity. In CruiseWeb, each franchise owner can set up basic communications rules that serve as the default for all reservations. They can also make changes to these communications rules tailored to individual clients. CruiseWeb then pulls the necessary client information to create a series of personalized communications, sent at the appropriate times according to each traveller’s departure and return date. Best of all, as long as the agent has opted-in so the client is set to receive communications, it all happens automatically. Mark Schiffner, vice-president and COO of Cruise Holidays, explained: “This program takes the already well-established personal relationships between a Cruise Holidays professional and their client, and it adds another personalized layer, which leads to stronger client retention.” Schiffner also pointed out that: “Travellers do a significant amount of trip research after booking and we want to remind them, through these communications, that if they want to book shore excursions, add travel insurance or just have a question, we have the knowledge and access to the best rates. In fact, we are proactively contacting them with advice on additional information that may make their trip even better. How many other agents are doing that on a completely consistent basis?”