Q&A with Marvin Davis, Michelle Fee and Lynn Korn of Cruise Planners.

Marvin Davis, a 40-year veteran in the travel business, joined with Michelle Fee and Lynn Korn, both 23-year veterans in the field, in 1994 to form Cruise Planners, an award winning national cruise agency headquartered in Coral Springs, Florida. The company operates a franchised network of experienced travel professionals who independently book cruises and other associated travel. Cruise Planners provides its franchisees with the highest industry commissions, preferential cruise pricing, superior booking opportunities, direct marketing support, cooperative advertising programs and advanced training.

In addition, the company facilitates the creation of independent, branded Internet sites for franchisees featuring a vast array of cruise information and supplier content. The company prides itself on giving its agents the highest commission levels available in the industry.

Licensed, bonded, and insured, Cruise Planners is a member of CLIA (Cruise Line International Association), NACOA (National Association of Cruise Only Agencies), and ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents).

Cruise Planners can be reached at (888) 582-2150 or through its website: www.beacruiseagent.com.

Q: Where did you get the idea for a franchised operation?

Marvin: It began during the time that I was operating my travel agencies. My daughter had young children at home and came to me wanting to know if I had any work around the office that she could do from there. I turned over my 800 number to her because we needed to improve our incoming phone service. The callers were people responding to my advertising campaign. Within six months she was selling at a rate out of the house that surpassed what our two offices were doing combined. That made us realize that the businesses of the future will be run from homes. The overhead for the brick and mortar travel agencies has begun to exceed the power of earning. By selling from home and using the techniques and the skills that we bring to the table, they can succeed.

People constantly told my daughter that she had a wonderful business and that it must be so wonderful to travel. She would invite them into the business. And that's how we got started. Our first class was comprised of eight people, seven of whom were her customers and one of whom had seen an ad that I had placed in a magazine.

We continue to advertise and bring people in from all walks of life. Because we've had people join us who've never been on a cruise ship before, part of our training involves touring a cruise ship, eating on board, and seeing what they're like. Ironically, some of our best salespeople are the ones who'd never been on a cruise.

Q: How did you actually start?

Michelle: For years, Lynn and I ran a travel agency and offered training classes so that we could produce a good outside sales staff. We built our outside sales staff into one of the largest in Coral Springs. Then Marvin came to us with his idea for Cruise Planners and we expanded upon that in the local market. But we wondered how we could take it nationally and make it something bigger than it was. We wanted to focus on cruises and thought about how people could make a living selling only cruises.

Q: What was the opportunity you saw in this industry that made you feel that selling cruises represented a real opportunity?

Marvin: We saw the decline in the relationship between the airlines and the travel agencies. We felt that the travel agencies of my era were becoming dinosaurs. Cruises were going to be the only form of travel left for which people definitely needed the advice of a professional. With airline tickets the travel arrangements are often ruled by the person's particular schedule, so that limits the airline choices. As a result, people book directly and the airlines have seen to it that agents are excluded. We saw this coming before most of the agents would admit to it. We realized that the strength of travel agencies was going to be in the cruise industry and we wanted to be there.

We finally put the theory into practice in 1994. The two offices formed a company called Cruise Planners and we took all of our cruise business from both companies and put it into one entity. By consolidating the two offices we were now able to compete because of the larger volume. I made sure to go to the cruise lines with Michelle and run our ideas past Bob Dickinson, president of Carnival and Rick Sasso, president of Celebrity. We wanted to be sure we were thinking correctly and headed in the right direction. Their advice was extremely useful and helped us make the decision we did.

Q: What attracts people to your group?

Lynn: It's simple. When someone works for a travel agency they typically get a 50/50 split. Our deal is much better. We only take 3% and that's only on the first half million dollars. After that we're down to 2% and after $750,000 in sales, we take 0%. We also have bonus programs and incentives that ensure that when you hit certain levels, we begin to pick up the costs of mailings as well as some of the cost of advertising and promotion.

Q: What were the factors that led to your success?

Marvin: I think the main factor is the accessibility that we give our franchisees. It's a philosophy we practice every day. If you're one of our franchisees we really true care about you.

Michelle: We call ourselves a family and we truly believe that. It doesn't matter who calls – whether it's a top producer or a new person – any one of the three of us will pick up the phone and we help walk them through their business. We have mentor programs in which we assign new people to top producers. The reason these top producers are so willing to help is because someone else in the company has helped them. They want to give back to the company. I've heard them say, “You helped me get to where I am so I feel I should help someone else.”

Lynn: All of us have been front line agents and know what it is like dealing with clients. Therefore, we make our decisions by thinking, “What would we have wanted as an agent in this situation?” We are a very “agent friendly” organization and completely understand their needs.

Q: What does Cruise Planners bring to the table in this business?

Marvin: We bring marketing and advertising expertise. We give our agents the ability to maneuver through the minefields of the travel industry by walking them through the process, and by bringing all our experience and contacts to bear on their situation.

Michelle: What most of our new franchisees lack is marketing experience. Most of the people who join us have had 9-5 jobs and very few have owned their own business, so we really teach them how to market. We help them understand how to create a marketing plan, and how to set goals and work towards them. When I started in business I didn't have anybody whom I could call and get help from. If a problem came up with a group booking, I had nowhere to turn for advice. I had to figure it out myself. What we give our franchisees is the ability to pick up the phone and get help. Of course, because of the experience, contacts, and knowledge we have, we can usually get them out of trouble.

Marvin: We publish materials such as handbooks that small agencies cannot provide. They don't have the staff or the capabilities or financial resources to put together materials like that.

Lynn: We also go out and negotiate special pricing, special deals, and special amenities for our agents. For example, we can bring over 1500 group dates to them, something a small independent agency could never get. We believe our franchisees are making sales because we give them some very real advantages over their competitors.

Q: Don't people who are working out of their houses have a harder time getting motivated and keeping going?

Marvin: Yes, some of them do. We make sure to help them in this area. For example, part of what we teach is that, even though they're working out of the house, they should get up in the morning and dress as if they were going to an office. Working out of the house is much more difficult than going to an office because you can't come in to an office in a robe. At home there's the temptation to turn on the television set or to do something else that takes you away from your business. We cover all these issues in our courses. We want them to take a business approach.

In fact, we try to help our franchisees prepare for all aspects of their business. We include in the franchise fee their stationery, business cards, manuals, and everything else they need at home to start their business. We go so far as to guide them toward the right message for their home answering machine or voice mail service.

Michelle: We give them an almost day-by-day calendar about how to grow their business. When they leave us after five days of training they have a step-by-step process for starting. After two or three weeks we then call them to follow up. We ask, “Have you taken step one?” If they're not self-starters, we're going to make sure that they are following the plan we've set out for them.

Marvin: We continually call our people to see if there's any way we can help. If we have advertising dollars from the cruise lines we offer it to them directly. We help them design their ads, and we tell them where we've had our successes and where we've had our failures. We're trying to give them every marketing advantage that we can.

Lynn: We've also developed our own software package for our franchisees. My husband, Phil Korn, has been in the computer industry for over 35 years (long before computers were a household business tool). He originally built a travel software program to meet the needs of a full service agency (owned by Lynn & Michelle). He then concentrated on the new home-based module's needs and developed a new software program specifically designed for the needs of the Cruise Planners franchisees.

Q: Do you continually hone your processes so that you improve them?

Michelle: We do that every day. We have our own weekly meetings to examine where we might be having particular challenges or if there are areas that we haven't covered. Are there things we can improve upon? The answer to the question about what has brought success to our business is that we listen. We hear what they need and try to put a program or tool together to help them.

We communicate with everyone over our intranet site. We put cruise specials, home office news, group news, and cruise industry news – everything to keep our agents up to date.

Q: What kinds of people do you feel make your best agents?

Marvin: Our best pool of talent consists of people who have already run their own travel agency. Many of these people have decided to retire from running an agency but still want to stay in the business. They are already at the level that it takes new people two or three years to get to. Just like anything else, selling cruises is a numbers game. The more you sell, the better deals you can get from the cruise lines. Also, by bringing in people who are already in the business, we don't have to train them. In fact, there are some who can teach us a thing or two.

Q: What is the growth of Cruise Planners since its beginning?

Lynn: Year to year, Cruise Planners has consistently shown a 20%-25% growth in productivity. In only a little over 8 years, we've grown from a volume of under $3 million in sales to over $60 million in 2003. We attribute this increase not only to addition of new agents, but also to the quality of the training, marketing and incentive programs as well as the support given to our franchisees by our home office staff. Cruise Planners has achieved recognition as a quality cruise selling organization represented by a team of highly trained professionals throughout the United States. The partnership between Cruise Planners and all the cruise lines has never been stronger and continues to flourish each year.