Appealing to travel advisors to start to sell cruises again, Royal Caribbean Group Chairman and CEO Richard Fain states his case in a newly released video.
The time has come, he said, to focus on how we come out of the pandemic, rather than how we should live during it. The time has come to look forward and do what we have done for decades, sell cruises.
Fain said a surge of interest has come mainly via the internet rather than from travel advisors, as people became used to buying things online during the pandemic, and continue to do so, while many travel advisors cut down on staff and marketing.
“Now, we need to rebuild so travel advisors need to do more,” he said. Appealing to travel advisors, Fain said: “We need you to reach our full potential. It was the personal contact with travel advisors that built up the knowledge and awareness (of cruising) in the first place.
“We need you and we need your personal touch, and the clients need you to help them understand the complexity of the product.”
Fain noted that while the pandemic is not over, its prevalence in the industrialized world is falling, and the main drivers behind the disease are understood and can be controlled.
He also noted that cruise ships have advantages over land-based comparables with the vast bulk of people onboard being vaccinated, and the sanitation being controlled, including air filtration, and with strict health and safety protocols being enforced.
“As a result, we can make ships safer than shore-based alternatives,” Fain said.
Comparing to a CDC color-coded COVID-19 map of the United States, Fain said that cruise ships would be blue, representing the lowest category of risk, and better than most of the counties in the U.S.
