Travel agents vs. Friends you trust

If your friend is a travel expert that knows what you want and can find the best deal for you then game over, you win. For cruise companies, over 80% of their bookings come from travel experts giving advice and recommendations to prospects on how and where to cruise. Dedicated cruisers, folks that troll travel forums like Cruise Critic, can self-service their research and cruise planning needs without a travel professional easily. When it comes to price, a big driver for both first-time cruisers and veterans alike, there a lot of wholesale discount travel sites that offer compelling deals.

Putting price aside which is a big consideration factor when choosing a cruise from a set of variations such as number of nights, stateroom type and port types in a particular destination, how do you sell an experience? With storytelling of course.

The best travel agents understand what the customer needs and can pitch a cruise experience according to what is most relevant to that prospect. It takes time to get to know what the consumer wants and some travel agents have the skill to maintain long business relationships because of their tacit knowledge of the consumers’ priorities and preferences. This process to build trust with your client can take time. With social media becoming an online standard, the ability to share experiences and enable friends to tell their stories to other friends is a new dimension in marketing travel that cruise companies need to maximize.

There are a couple perspectives that make the leap of faith into social media a big challenge. From the corporate point of view, enabling part of your brand in the hands of the consumer requires new marketing tools that won’t be cost-efficient at first (although they are not that expensive) and the return on investment is a trial and error model that should be managed internally optimistically rather than risk-averse. In most cases, to do social media properly there are big budget related questions to clarify with corporate marketing executives such as:

• Upgrading site: How do I integrate social media into our current web booking flow?
• Inbound scenarios: Where is my target audience online and how do I maximize my online spend?
• Content moderation: What do we do with consumers that talk poorly about our brand?
• Coordinated marketing: When do you launch your PR tactics to build organic buzz with influencers and their social networks?

From a consumer standpoint, making it easy and fun to tell your cruise story is where post-cruise marketing becomes part of the guests’ total travel experience. It also is the hero that helps to build trust and confidence with peers that seek relevant touch points that match their research and planning needs when it comes to considering another cruise with your brand.

“Social media and travel are a perfect fit, because they both are built around this idea of sharing experiences and storytelling,” said Mary Madden, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington, D.C. “Content, whether that’s a blog post about your favorite restaurant or the story from your latest trip to Greece and photos of that trip, is a form of social currency that you share with other people who frequent your social media space.”
Social Networking Changing The Way We Travel

Both travel agents and friends you trust will help cruise marketing online grow, it is up to cruise companies to build the right web applications that enable both target groups to promote the brand in relevant ways. More importantly, social media solutions need to be created internally with all marketing channels in mind that include PR, print and web subject matter experts.