Cruise Planners Wins 4 Gold Magellan Awards for Technology and Marketing Excellence
CORAL SPRINGS, Fla., Oct. 22, 2025 — Cruise Planners has been honored with FOUR Gold Travel Weekly Magellan Awards, once again demonstrating its leadership in travel technology and marketing innovation. The Magellan Awards celebrate outstanding achievements across the travel industry, and Cruise Planners’ latest recognition underscores its continued commitment to empowering travel advisors with groundbreaking tools and inspiring consumer campaigns.
This year, Cruise Planners received Magellan Awards for its technology innovations: Maxx Snippets and Shortcuts, as well as two marketing campaigns, Adventure Calling Direct Mail and Princess “Sea of Love” Sale. These wins highlight Cruise Planners’ dedication to streamlining advisor operations while also sparking traveler engagement across multiple channels.
“We’re proud to be recognized once again for our innovation in both technology and marketing,” said Michelle Fee, founder and CEO of Cruise Planners. “These awards reflect our commitment to helping our advisors work smarter and grow their businesses with tools and campaigns that inspire travelers and deliver results.”
Award-Winning Technology Tools
Maxx Snippets
Maxx Snippets is a dynamic content management tool that allows advisors to save, categorize, and reuse their most effective messaging for proposals, newsletters, and emails. By maintaining brand consistency and saving valuable time, Snippets empowers advisors to communicate professionally and efficiently with their clients. Snippets can also be shared across a franchise, ensuring a unified brand voice across the network.
Maxx Shortcuts
Shortcuts is a productivity-boosting feature that allows advisors to consolidate their most frequently used tools within Cruise Planners’ CRM. With a customizable drag-and-drop interface, advisors can easily access their preferred features—reducing clicks, increasing efficiency, and allowing more time to focus on clients. Together, these two tools streamline operations and enhance the advisor-client experience.
Award-Winning Marketing Campaigns
Adventure Calling
Recognizing a growing appetite for transformative, bucket-list experiences, Cruise Planners used proprietary data insights to identify high-potential clients most likely to pursue adventure and expedition travel. The Adventure Calling campaign inspired travelers to explore destinations such as Asia, Australia, Africa, the Polar Regions, and beyond. Leveraging segmentation tools for personalized targeting, the campaign delivered compelling visuals and storytelling that drove engagement and bookings across exotic and expedition categories.
Princess “Sea of Love” Sale
In partnership with Princess Cruises, Cruise Planners launched the exclusive “Sea of Love” Sale, a multi-channel campaign designed to drive bookings during wave season. The integrated B2C strategy included targeted emails to 900,000 households, daily social media content, e-newsletters, and homepage takeovers. Advisors were supported through webinars, internal communications, and personalized outreach, creating a powerful network-wide push that generated significant client engagement and sales growth.
In addition to Cruise Planners’ corporate wins, Cruise Planners franchise owners Julie Irovando and Tawnee Sons were also recognized with three Magellan Awards for their inspiring agency culture and business innovation.
Gold: Overall – Travel Agent Innovation
Silver: Overall – Training Program
Silver: Overall – Business Strategy
Their entry, titled “The Relentless Pursuit of a Happy Agency,” highlighted how their Cruise Planners franchise fosters a culture of fulfillment, collaboration, and purpose—empowering its team to thrive both personally and professionally. Through smarter efficiencies, tailored growth strategies, and a focus on work-life balance, Sons and Irovando have cultivated an environment where advisors can succeed, support one another, and stay passionate about travel.
“We’re incredibly proud of Tawnee and Julie for their well-deserved recognition,” said Michelle Fee, founder and CEO of Cruise Planners. “Their success is a perfect example of the entrepreneurial spirit that defines our Cruise Planners network. By fostering a culture of collaboration, balance, and passion for travel, they’ve built a thriving business that inspires both their team and fellow advisors.”
Company Background: Cruise Planners was founded in 1994 and is the nation’s largest home-based travel agent franchise network. As a leader in the travel franchise industry, Cruise Planners positions a nation-wide network of over 3,000 franchise owners for success by providing innovative marketing programs, proprietary and cutting-edge booking, and technology tools, as well as professional development and hands-on training with the industry’s top executives. Recognized as a low-cost franchise opportunity, Cruise Planners has been ranked the No. 1 travel franchise by Entrepreneur magazine for 18 consecutive years. and awarded by Franchise Business Review as “Best-In-Category” for 2 years.
Franchise Business Review also ranked Cruise Planners #3 OVERALL on their list of Top 200 Franchises of 2022. Cruise Planners was recently featured in Entrepreneur as one of the top 30 franchise innovators in technology, has been consistently named as one of the Top Women-Owned Businesses by the South Florida Business Journal, is on the Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, and was recognized as one of the Top Workplaces by the Sun Sentinel.
Visit our website, www.cruiseplanners.com, for more information or to view the complete list of awards and honors. For those interested in becoming a franchise owner, please visit https://www.cruiseplannersfranchise.com/.
