Cruise Planners Doubles Down on Luxury and River Cruise Sales

Cruise Planners, an American Express Travel Representative, recently hosted its second annual Luxury and River Cruise Forum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This 3-day event was designed to educate and inspire Cruise Planners agents to focus their efforts on increasing their luxury and river cruise sales. 

“I love that look our agents get when a new idea clicks and they’re already thinking how they can apply it to their business,” Fee said. “We design these luxury training events to make sure our agents are not just learning, they’re taking action and surpassing their goals.”

Cruise Planners has implemented a variety of tools to help keep agents visible to luxury clients and to better market to their database such as:

• CP Insights – Using segmentation codes to analyze client behaviors, Cruise Planners agents are able to target the right clients more effectively and efficiently. This “insight” into their customers also gives their agents the confidence to present a luxury vacation product to them.
• The Sophisticated Traveler E-Newsletter – In addition to Cruise Planners’ weekly travel deals email, The Sophisticated Traveler luxury e-newsletter was created to target upscale, experienced travelers and includes exclusive deals and offers from Cruise Planners.
• Custom Luxury Events and Invitations – Hosting events helps Cruise Planners agents expand their client base and build connections with current clients. To help market these high-end events, Cruise Planners offers premium, customizable materials including invitations, brochures and other marketing materials.
• Luxury and River Cruise Marketing Assets – Cruise Planners luxury travel marketing campaigns have won multiple Travvy and Magellan Awards. These include direct mail pieces that are designed in-house by Cruise Planners marketing team and feature resorts, cruises and escorted tours and move to help agents seal the deal with luxury travelers.

At the forum, luxury experts were on hand to inspire the agents on how to best reach, close and retain a luxury customer. Cruise Planners preferred travel partners were featured as keynote speakers, held one-on-one meetings and took part in luxury and river cruise panels hosted by Cruise Planners owners and executives. Keynote speakers included Larry Pimentel, President and CEO of Azamara Club Cruises; Mark Conroy, Managing Director of Silversea Cruises; and Edie Rodriguez, Americas Brand Chairman of Ponant.

Cruise Planners top-producing travel agents in both luxury and river cruise segments also took the stage to share their best practices and personal experience including tips for hosting successful events, providing high-touch customer experiences, and tips for easy yet effective ways to utilize videos and engage on social media. The forum closed with hands-on, interactive workshops that brought together agents and luxury travel partners for roundtable discussions led by Scott Koepf, Cruise Planners’ newest leadership team member and VP of Strategic Development.

"Luxury travel and impeccable service go hand-in-hand, so we’re equipping our agents with the tools and knowledge they need to stand out and ensure they have invaluable one-on-one meeting time with our luxury and river cruise partners," Fee said. "This forum is about challenging our agents – whether they’ve been with us one year or 25 years – to expand their luxury travel and river cruise business in new ways."