Tag Archives: Travel agents

Canadian agent group asks Carnival to change NCF policy

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Canadian agent group asks Carnival to change NCF policy

By Tom Stieghorst

The Association of Canadian Travel Agents (ACTA) has sent Carnival Corp. a letter asking that it reconsider its handling of the noncommissionable portion of cruise fares.

In a dispatch to members, group President David McCaig said he is raising the issue now to respond to newly named Carnival CEO Arnold Donald’s call for improved relations with agents.

“The hope is that under Mr. Donald’s leadership, ACTA’s voice will not fall on deaf ears,” the memo said.

Commenting on the letter, a Carnival spokesman said, “Travel agents are absolutely critical to our long-term success, and we are doing a number of positive things across our 10 brands to continue to strengthen our ties with our agency partners around the world. We certainly understand and appreciate the issues being raised, and I know Arnold plans to look into this further and give this issue a thorough review with his leadership team.”

McCaig said that noncommissionable fees (NCFs) create misunderstanding and distrust with clients because the charges are hard to explain.

He wrote that traditionally an agent will present NCFs to a client with terms such as “supplemental fares,” “nondisclosed cruise fees,” “add-on fares” or “hidden surcharges.”

“When a travel agent seeks support from Carnival Cruise Lines’ reservations to quantify NCFs, they are always at a loss to do so,” McCaig said. “It is unfair that travel agents are portrayed as an obstacle to lower fares.”

NCFs are used not only by Carnival’s brands but by most cruise lines, which say that the fees reflect unspecified government fees and other charges that amount to pass-through costs not part of the product.

Eric Maryanov, president of All-Travel.com, said he thinks NCFs could be better detailed by the industry in general.

“Taxes, port charges, I get it,” he said. But some cruise invoices have a line item for port charges and then another that simply says “NCF” with no explanation of what that NCF is, he said.

McCaig said the letter to Carnival asks Donald to “seriously consider changing Carnival brands’ NCF commission policy by establishing familiar and consistent terminology for the travel agency community to use with their clients.” It also asks Carnival to commission the cruise “with both amounts combined (commissionable and noncommissionable) at current levels.

McCaig said in the dispatch to members that he sent the letter on Oct. 23.

Mobile could pose biggest threat to travel stores of the future

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Mobile could pose biggest threat to travel stores of the future

 

By Travolution
By Travolution

The move by technology giant Apple to establish a high street presence should provide the inspiration for the bricks and mortar travel stores of the future, but mobile could emerge as their biggest threat.

The fourth annual WTM Vision half-day conference in London debated the future of the high street with David Burling, managing director of Tui UK and Andy Washington, managing director of Expedia taking part in a panel debate.

Burling used the example of Apple, which has a network of stores throughout the UK in prime locations showcasing its products, as an example of how the future of the high street might look.

“The travel agency has evolved and it will keep evolving. If you have bookings that can be transacted across different channels the stores of the future may be different from the stores of today.

“What is clear is that the quality of the service and advice that good travel agents can give is still very important.

“Channels are becoming more blurred. The technology will become more available for consumers to start the booking in one channel and finish it elsewhere.

“The strength of the retailer is really around the product knowledge and customer service but there is also a role for the stores of the future offering more inspiration at the very early stages of the booking.

“Who would have believed that Apple of all people would have decided to open a load of retail stores?”

Mike Greenacre, former managing director of Co-operative travel  and a delegate at today’s event agreed.

“I very much agree with Dave about inspiration. The high street has greatly evolved and I think it will continue. The big change that will come is how retail stores embrace this technology.

“Where there is an Apple store it’s the busiest shop in town by a long long way.”

However, Andy Washington, managing director of Expedia UK, said: “The biggest threat to the high street us mobile.

“What’s stopping me going into a high street store getting them to do all the work and then googling it on my mobile to find it cheaper?”

Burling said Tui UK’s strategy is based around its differentiated product offering that stems from its close partnerships with hoteliers that has seen it develop a number of resort concepts.

“We want to be involved in designing a particular hotel experience with our partners. By doing that we get a better consumer experience, better repeat business and better reviews.”

Burling said concepts like its Splashworld water park resorts were showing “huge growth”.

“It’s identifying the customer requirements and working with hotel partners. We can do that because of our scale.”

– See more at: http://www.travolution.co.uk/articles/2012/04/20/5624/mobile-could-pose-biggest-threat-to-travel-stores-of-the-future.html#sthash.keVsk23U.dpuf

Cruise agents demand simpler technology and more aggregation

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Cruise agents demand simpler technology and more aggregation

By Travolution
By Travolution

Travolution’s sister site Travel Weekly and Amadeus invited agents to discuss cruise technology o the day the GDS unveiled its Cruise Shop system

Agents bemoan lack of aggregation as lines steer trade to own systems

Agents are battling a lack of aggregation in the cruise sector as operators entice them to use their own in-house booking systems.

Amadeus Cruise Shop features most of the main cruise lines in the UK with the notable exception of Carnival UK’s brands: P&O Cruises, Cunard and Princess Cruises.Carnival UK trade arm Complete Cruise Solution pulled out of the Amadeus system in 2011 to save on distribution costs.

Amadeus hopes to entice lines back with a new trade platform developed with CWT Digital to give agents a one-stop shop to search for and compare product easily and quickly.

However, many lines are incentivising agents to use their own technology – resulting in agents switching between multiple systems to earn more commission.

This is slowing agents down, hampering their ability to compare deals and sell cruise and even putting some off selling cruise entirely, the round-table heard.

Paul Frost (pictured right), marketing director at Jetline Cruise, said: “Lines have pushed everyone away from Amadeus because they want to entice you to sell their product.

“This is no bad thing, but to ask an agent, who has a customer who does not know what they want, to log in to Norwegian Cruise Line, to Cruising Power for Royal Caribbean and Celebrity, to Complete Cruise Solution, to Polar for Carnival, well, no agent’s going to do that.

“To run an effective business you can’t have an agent spending three or four hours on one customer trying to find something when they don’t even know what they are trying to find. Agents are fighting against what should be a really simple process.”

Andy Stark, managing director of Global Travel Group, said: “There is aggregation for every other type of product but it seems to me there’s no aggregator for cruise.”

Frost said: “There used to be Amadeus, but cruise lines decided to invest money to keep the agents within their own framework.”

Cruise Shop has solved a key failing of existing systems, according to Frost.

Frost said one of the major failures of cruise booking systems is they do not enable agents to search for a selection of ports with the required dates.

“It will be interesting to see if Amadeus has solved this as this has been one of the biggest problems for agents,” he said.

“You can never ask an agent to make such a search. I would not want my agents to do that sort of enquiry because it would take them three or four hours and they would end up with nothing.”

Having been shown how the new Amadeus system enables a search by multiple destinations, Frost said: “You have just solved a huge issue the industry has.”

 


Quality of cruise content is key issue in battle for sales

Cruise operators could generate more sales through agents if they ensured the content they have on their own sites was available to the trade.

Leading agency consortium Advantage Travel Centres represents a wide range of cruise sellers, from Cruise.co.uk at one end of the market to single-brand high street stores at the other.

To help its members it has developed its own Gateway booking platform with Multicom.

But Claire Brighton, Advantage commercial account manager, said:

“All our agents are looking for some technology that would allow them to quote a cruise in a quicker way.

“We have built our own gateway and tried to put cruise lines on that. The issue is the content that you pull via XML has not got as much information as on their own sites.”

Dan Caplin, managing director of CWT Digital, said there was a wider issue with online content, with neither agents nor operators answering the questions people have.

“It’s the responsibility of cruise lines to get over what makes their product different. And agents need to get content online to change people’s perceptions.”

Jetline’s Frost said many deals loaded on to systems were overly complex, as cruise operators constantly tweaked offers and incentives to drive sales.

“At times there are five different options to book exactly the same cruise,” he said. “People just want simplicity.

“We are a reasonably-sized agent but we have to put huge resources in just to update our website because none of this comes through any technology feed.”

– See more at: http://www.travolution.com/articles/2013/10/11/7171/cruise-agents-demand-simpler-technology-and-more-aggregation.html#sthash.CV5Ni3sg.dpuf