Looking beyond the holidays, cruise lines and travel agencies are gearing up for Wave season, which runs from early January to late March, typically the busiest time of year for cruise bookings.
It also is widely seen as a harbinger of things to come.
"I can tell how the year is going to end up based on Wave season," said Anthony Hamawy, president of Cruise.com. "It's a darn good indicator. A significant chunk of business comes in, and usually for us it begins on the first nonholiday Monday in January."
The test of success, though, is how long the spurt of bookings lasts.
"If it's just a spike of a week or two, that's not so great," Hamawy said. "The range of how long it lasts is the key, but we always do significant business during January and February and maybe into March."
Cruise line executives have been preparing for Wave season 2012 since earlier this fall. Norwegian Cruise Line last week announced the first promotion tied to the 2012 campaign.
"We launch right before the holidays," said Andy Stuart, executive vice president of global sales and passenger services. "It used to be after the holidays, but we like to get our partners familiar with the offer and make sure it's up and running before the phones are ringing off the hook."
Norwegian's campaign, called Take It to the Next Level, features automatic cabin upgrades and up to $400 in spending credits. It's valid through March, Stuart said, so that every time an agent pitches a Norwegian cruise, "the offer is constant on every single booking."
Additionally, Norwegian later will roll out what it calls its Featured Destination Pulse offers. These will last for a few weeks, providing other value-added promotions tied to certain cruise destinations.
Stuart said Norwegian typically books a disproportionate amount of business during Wave season, which he said sets the tone for the rest of the year.
"We also definitely celebrate the cold weather," he said. "There's always a very positive vibe in the office when we see some supercold weather and snowfall. It is a little selfish. But it's just natural that when people are cold, they start thinking about getting away to the sunshine."
At Royal Caribbean International, the trade support staff has been working with retailers since late October, getting them up to speed on what the line's promotions will be.
"We've been in the process of training agents on how to market during Wave season," said Vicki Freed, senior vice president of sales and trade support. "We're doing a webinar series showing how to have a cruise night, how to develop a marketing plan and other [initiatives]."
Freed added that she's received "a lot of good feedback" from agents.
Royal Caribbean's Wave season campaign will tie in with its newly announced global branding platform, which uses the tag line "The Sea Is Calling. Answer It Royally."
"It's going to help create new momentum for the brand and for our partners," Freed said.
Over the years, she observed, the approach to Wave season has changed.
"It started out as Wave week, then became Wave month and now it's Wave season," she said. "I've seen a lot of them during my [career]. We fine-tune our approach as we get more sophisticated, and we look at the results over the years to see what worked and what didn't. We used to just jump in, but now we're planning and preparing ahead and getting our special offers out to our national accounts before the season starts."
Agents not affiliated with one of Royal's national accounts will be offered a different set of promotions, which Freed described as "a menu of offers."
There also will be bonus commission for bookings made through the line's Choice Air program.
"The reason we like to encourage Choice Air is because once the clients have booked [cruise and air], it's 99% certain they're going to sail," she said.
Freed echoed Hamawy's and Stuart's opinions that a good Wave season translates into a good year overall.
"It's a very important part of the success of the year," she said. "If agents and cruise lines can have a robust Wave, then the rest of the year tends to shape up. When Wave hasn't been as strong, we struggle to get the demand we need. But we always get the demand we need, in the end."
Mimi Comfort, who operates Cruise Holidays of Kansas City with her husband, Mark, agreed that Wave season is an important campaign, even though in recent years, she said, she has seen bookings "level out" over the course of the whole year.
"It's not as much of a roller coaster as it used to be in years past," Comfort said. "But we're already seeing a lot of the cruise vendors being very aggressive with their marketing campaigns for Wave season. They're looking for a very strong first quarter, and I think they are going to get it."
Comfort has 25 employees at her franchise and has just hired a few more to help with Wave season.
"We feel like it's going to be a great Wave season," Comfort said. "We're already seeing an increase in sales. I think [customers] will book a vacation for 2012 because they're saying, 'Enough is enough; we're gonna go!'"
For 2012, her franchise is focusing not only on ocean cruising but on river cruising, as well.
"I feel like that market is going to continue to explode," she said. "And it's been exciting to see all the new river ships coming out. We're very optimistic about 2012."
Evan Eggers, president of SureCruise.com, declared that he was feeling positive about the economy and was expecting a strong Wave season.
"The cruise lines came into 2011 feeling good," he said. "They might have been overly optimistic and less aggressive, but now, coming into 2012, they are planning to be very aggressive, so I like our chances going into the new year."
For cruise news and updates, follow Donna Tunney on Twitter @dttravelweekly.