Nearly twenty-five years ago, I accidentally ended up in cruise tech and I’m still here. Why? Because the challenges – and opportunities – that existed in the early days of e-commerce are still relevant today, albeit in a different travel market, at a different scale and with different technologies available to help.
The challenges arise from how to connect the online and offline cruise planning and booking process through technology, helping travel agents sell cruise, giving passengers access to rich content to facilitate their decision-making process while enabling cruise lines to fill their ships with even more passengers.
Journey
During the first dotcom boom, I used my interest in the graphic design technology of the time to build a website for a friend, who ended up raising a few million and put me in charge of an IT department. Here, I discovered a knack for identifying processes our customers wanted to spend less time on. My experience delivering tech-enabled automation landed me the job at Cruise411.rt while later. I was able to automate the selling process, helping the business optimise its staffing levels and focus agents’ time and attention on selling cruises not sending faxes.
When the chance came to launch a cruise tech business from the ground up, I dived straight in because I knew that tech-enabled automation, for back-office and consumer-facing processes, was part of the future, even if we weren’t sure how that future would develop.
Destination
Fast forward twenty years or so. The ships and the product, source markets, price points, demographics and more have changed. But some things are constant – cruise is often overlooked in favour of higher volume products such as flights and hotels, yet cruise pays the highest commission of all travel verticals. Traditionally, there have been specialist cruise agencies who have cornered the lion’s share of the market. But today, it is possible for almost any travel agent around the world to sell cruises because there is technology on the market that normalises cruise content.
Generalist agents can add an out-of-the-box solution which can power their presence in the cruise sector. However, many of the solutions also offer customization options. In some cases the generalist and specialists will be using the same tools.
Normalising content is not unrelated to automation. When the content from different cruise lines has been ingested into a system which normalises how the content is displayed and standardises the processes, then automation of front, back and mid-office functions become possible. This allows agents to focus on generating value for clients rather than generating spreadsheets for accounts.
2. Normalisation can also describe the most effective way for the same solution to operate across the different touchpoints between client and agent. For high street stores, people coming onto the premises want to talk to an agent and be shown what the ship looks like, how the decks are configured, what the food and beverage options are. Chances are the customer will have already had a look at the agent’s website before coming in, so what the agent says and what the website says need to be the same. When there is one system overseeing both touchpoints, consistency follows.
The number of agents interested in selling cruises will continue to expand – demand for cruises appears to be in sync with the ever-increasing supply of berths. The cruise lines themselves are keen to promote the growth in direct bookings, while accepting the necessity for agents, and we see this as a good thing for agents and cruise technology providers alike. As cruise lines re-engineer their systems to facilitate direct booking, they are putting in place the architecture for APIs and direct connects which can help indirect bookings. This allows agents to access a full suite of content with real-time prices and availability.
As the industry scales, so too does the business case for even more automation of processes and normalisation of content. There is still room for further innovation across all cruise touchpoints.
Next stop
The growth profile for cruise is strong. The sector has recovered from the pandemic, with 2023 ahead of 2019 and 2024 tipped to outperform 2023. Cruise lines are reinventing the product and investing millions in marketing which is driving the demand that agents – or those with access to the right technology – can satisfy.
The cruise industry is also growing in what are often called emerging markets, such as the Philippines or Indonesia, where the volume is already comparable in scale with some established Western markets. With globalisation comes another requirement – regulatory compliance across different geographies. This is yet another use case for normalisation. When processes are consistent, regulatory requirements can be applied more effectively, with the system doing the heavy lifting so that if an agent in the UK wants to sell a five-day fun cruise in and out of Miami, that booking will be compliant with all regulations.
The demand for cruising, and therefore the need for technological advancement, continues to grow. Cruise lines, travel agents, and technology providers continue to flourish in partnership, advancing the industry to new heights and arenas.
