Tom Stieghorst
Five years ago when began working at Travel Weekly, I was a bit perplexed at how far out of favor Carnival Cruise Line had fallen with travel agents.
I had spent the previous four years at a job where I didn't focus much on cruising. The last time I looked, Carnival was still an innovator and a sales powerhouse. That was about the time former president Bob Dickinson retired.
Today, I dare say Carnival is back in the good graces of more travel agents. Its low price points and shorter itineraries are always going to keep ultra-luxury agents from flocking to Carnival. But other agents are back.
Look no further than last week's announcement at the Ensemble Travel Group conference in Dallas that Carnival will be added to the network's list of preferred suppliers.
"The members were asking for it," said Ensemble co-founder Lindsay Pearlman. "We do extremely well with them."
That followed by a month the news that Signature Travel Network was returning to Carnival's preferred provider stable after exiting in 2012. Carnival signed preferred agreements last year with the Travelsavers and NEST consortia.
Pearlman said it added Carnival because its distribution strategy has evolved "relative to 3 to 5 years ago," when the company focused more on direct sales.
Carnival's epiphany happened in 2013 when after the Carnival Triumph engine room fire and the resulting torrent of bad publicity, it found few agents in its corner willing to counter some of the negative sentiment about the brand.
Since then it has corrected course, first under former vice president of worldwide sales Joni Rein, and for the past two years under vice president of trade sales and marketing Adolfo Perez, who was named to the job in 2015 by new Carnival president Christine Duffy.
Almost none of the people at the top of Carnival Corp. and Carnival Cruise Line today are the same as those running things in 2012.
I spoke last week with Sharon Carr, owner of a Dallas agency who said her ties with Carnival go back to the Bob Dickinson era. She said Carnival works well for her business. "Whenever we can pull the business towards Carnival we will do that," she said.
Nonetheless, Carr said she had decreased her bookings with Carnival because it had made higher commission tiers harder to reach. Now commissions terms are less onerous. And Carr said she's excited about the new "Amp Up" commission challenge that Carnival announced to boost commissions in 2018 based on sales benchmarks in the first quarter.
While Carnival may never be every agent's cup of tea, it is making steady progress towards becoming just another cruise line with the majority of agents, which considering where it was five years ago, is a solid achievement.