Travel Agent - September 10, 2007 - (Page 46)

Cruises Continued from page 45 better profits, Joan McCarty, owner of Specialty Travel in St. Petersburg, FL, is most impressed about modest pricing in Europe. “I’m really pleased with it,” she says. “Carnival, for instance, has a price point that middle America can afford. Europe has really been a gold mine.” agent and client. “I don’t like that clients are having to go online to print out tickets,” she says. “It’s causing a problem because it’s another way we are losing the personal touch. The more you can touch your clients, the better.” For example, when mailing cruise tickets to clients, she will often accompany them with personal bon voyage notes. owner of Reid Travel in Boca Raton, FL, is less impressed. “I think it’s very shoddy,” he bluntly says. “It wouldn’t cost the cruise lines much to send them to us.” That aside, Jacob doesn’t have many other complaints. “Everything is wonderful,” he says of the current state of the cruise industry. As for the relationship between the cruise lines and travel agents, Cruise Value Center’s Kivet hopes that the lines don’t alienate the agents. “Some think they can go along without the agents,” he says, “and replace sales guys with E-Ticketing: Losing Personal Touch With Clients McCarty is happy about that; electronic documents, on the other hand, are a whole different can of worms. Many cruise lines have migrated from issuing paper documents to e-ticketing, in an effort to provide an easier and more accessible method for guests to obtain their documentation. Princess Cruises led the shift when it went paperless last September; other cruise lines soon followed suit. To McCarty, it’s just another mechanism that is proving to widen the void between a line “When ship to moves a somewhere new in Europe, it makes revenues better. —JEFF KIVET Agent and Cruise Line Relations McCarty does admit that e-docs cut down on office costs ($16 a pop in her case). But Bill Jacob, ” Australia Hotels • Transfers • Sightseeing • Car Rentals www.BookTravelBound.com FIT 800-808-9541 · FIT@BookTravelBound.com Groups 800-808-9547 · Groups@BookTravelBound.com 46 TravelAgent September 10, 2007 Interested? Request #020. http://www.booktravelbound.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Travel Agent - September 10, 2007

Contents Editor's Letter News You Can Use Agenda: Fam Trips, Calendar of Events, Deal of the Week South America Rising: COVER STORY EUROPE: Undiscovered Croatia PACIFIC/ASIA: Chiang Mai: Hotspot of Northern Thailand LAS VEGAS: Las Vegas’ Inside Man Las Vegas News & Notes Las Vegas: The New Frontier PACIFIC NORTHWEST: A Gem on Oregon’s Central Coast FLORIDA: Hyatt Regency Miami Spruces Up Ensemble Update Agent Outlook: Cruising Today Nantucket Island Resorts Classified Marketplace Home-Based Travel Expo Update Advertisers’ Information People & Places Thailand Planner

Travel Agent - September 10, 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.