Promotions and special prices have helped the industry recover from the bad publicity in 2013. Cruise Planners had the best month in the company’s history earlier this year.
“It’s amazing how people react when cruise lines tweak pricing. And cruisers will always cruise,” Fee says.
While people who have never taken a cruise might be turned off by an incident, regular cruise vacationers return.
“We’ve done surveys that bear it out. I’ve never had someone say, ‘No, I would never cruise again because the norovirus broke out.’ I went on an airplane a couple of weeks ago and came home with the flu. Does that mean I’m never going to get on an airplane again?” Fee says.
Customers have grown to expect deals and will wait for the best ones before booking again, she says.
“It’s not like they’re not going to travel and they’re not going to cruise, but sometimes if they hear things — and we’ve been told this in the past — they sit back and wait for the cruise lines to react,” Fee says.
Another way agents add value is by taking away the work in planning a vacation. While anyone can conduct research and book trips on the Internet, that can involve a lot of time and uncertain results. Fee says Cruise Planners agents go beyond being order takers and offer travel expertise.
“We always use the tagline, ‘Why spend four weeks booking a four-day vacation?’ When you go online and do the research yourself, it’s hours of time. And we know where to send you.
“We have the resources and we’ve either traveled there or sailed there, or have resources that consumers don’t. So we can plan a top-shelf vacation,” Fee says.
For those who have sworn off cruises or were never interested, Cruise Planners’ agents also book hotel rooms, airline tickets and cars for land-based travel. But that aspect of the business is not promoted as much.
“That’s part of the business because even somebody who is a cruiser might want to take a land-based vacation. Take the kids to Disney or a trip to Las Vegas,” Fee says. “But our focus is on cruises.”
Takeaways:
- Invest in your company’s future.
- Never get so big that you aren’t approachable.
- Give people the training and tools to succeed.
The Fee File:
Name: Michelle Fee
Title: Co-founder and CEO
Company: Cruise Planners-American Express Travel
Born: Coral Springs, Florida
What was your first job and what did you learn from it? I worked for my father. He owns a couple of hair salons, hence the nice hair. I would work there on weekends, sweeping hair and cleaning dye bottles. It taught me that if you work hard, eventually good things will happen.
Who has been the biggest influence on your life? I’ve watched a few people in this industry, one in particular named Vicki Freed, a senior vice president at Royal Caribbean. What I love is that she never forgot where she came from and has always been an advocate for travel agents. I’ve watched her career and thought that if I ever get to that point in my career, I want to make sure I never forget anybody along the way.
What is the best business advice you ever received? The best business advice I would give is to surround yourself with good people. I’m not the smartest person out there; I have good people skills. But I’ve surrounded myself with really talented people who could give me good advice to help me run this business and take it to the levels I want it to go.
What did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. Early in my life my dad opened up a travel agency and had me run it with another woman. That changed the direction of where I was going, and I never expected to be here 30 years later.
When people say they were in the right place at the right time, that’s how I would explain how this happened.
What’s your favorite vacation spot, and where’s the place you’d still like to go? Africa. I love the safari.
What I would like to do eventually is live within Italy for a month, maybe Tuscany. Or picking a different destination and, rather than visiting for a short period of time, really submerging myself into a culture.
