Celebrity to add overnight port stays on long Caribbean cruises

Celebrity Cruises said it will add an overnight stay to the itinerary of Caribbean cruises of 10 days or longer, starting in January 2016. The decision affects 43 cruises, said Dondra Ritzenthaler, senior vice president of sales, trade support and services.

Ritzenthaler stressed that overnights are typically a feature of cruises outside the Caribbean, so Celebrity is breaking ground with the move.

“This gives us the ability to say we have more overnights in the Caribbean than any cruise line in the industry,” Ritzenthaler said. "While overnights have been a trend in the marketplace in Europe and in Asia, there really hasn’t been a movement and we believe we are a leader in this initiative." 

The destinations where overnights are planned include Aruba, Barbados, Cartagena, Cozumel, Curacao and St. Maarten. Ritzenthaler said they are among the highest-rated destinations in the Caribbean by guests.

"Consumer and trade research indicates this is something they desire,” Ritzenthaler said.

Of Celebrity’s 10 ships, five are scheduled to be in the Caribbean in the first quarter of 2016, but not all do itineraries of 10 days or longer.

Celebrity has been selling the 2016 Caribbean winter season since the fall of 2014 and cruises have been booking well, Ritzenthaler said. Now booked guests will get the bonus of an overnight stay. “This will be a really wonderful gift for these folks,” she said. “This will be something that will be a really nice opportunity for them. We think it will be a differentiator."

RCCL to launch new
web-based res. system

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCCL) will launch a new Internet-based reservations system for retailers in March called Espresso, its first complete upgrade since it introduced CruiseMatch in 1990.

Espresso will modernize the functions that travel agents use to book cruises, making them more productive, company executive said. It will be used by all of the RCCL brands, including Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Club Cruises.

“Espresso will help agents focus more on their customers, rather than looking at their computer screens,” said Dondra Ritzenthaler, senior vice president for sales at Celebrity.

She said it would be a faster, more powerful, more intuitive system that will shorten the number of steps to make an online booking from seven to five.

Another feature enables agents to compare up to four potential bookings at one time.

Espresso will be optimized for mobile phones and tablets, which is important to home agents visiting clients, said Vicki Freed, Royal Caribbean’s senior vice president of sales.

It will have a robust function for providing past guest information, she said.

RCCL will hold a series of in-person training sessions in six cities around the country in February and March before launch. There will also be webinars, a three-minute instructional video, and an online site that simulates Espresso, at www.espressocbt.com.

Royal plans to run Espresso concurrently with Cruise Match for three to four months to enable agents to get up to speed.

CruiseMatch was launched as a GDS system in 1990 and converted to be primarily Web-based in 1998, with further upgrades in 2007 and 2009. 

Celebrity Cruises to eliminate NCFs on some June bookings

By Tom Stieghorst

Celebrity Cruises will pay commission on what is typically invoiced as noncommissionable cruise fare (NCF) on some cruises sold in June by travel agents in North America.

The extra commission applies to 2015 sailings, if agents book veranda cabins and above. NCFs can account to 10-15% of the total cruise price.

Celebrity’s offer to agents coincides with a renewal of its 123Go! promotion to consumers. The offer to agents is being styled as "123 Thank You."

Payments on the NCF portion of the sale are on bookings of all duration and every geographic area, said Dondra Ritzenthaler, Celebrity’s senior vice president of sales.
“We have never done anything like this before,” Ritzenthaler said.

Ritzenthaler said that 2015 bookings were not notably behind or in need of a boost.

“It’s a 30 day way to say thank you to all of our travel partners who have really supported us through all of our promotions,” she said.