"There's a Renaissance in cruising," all right.
The people at Renaissance, the cruise line agents love not to
love, finally found their way to the chart table to plot a
long-overdue course correction. Gone is founder, chairman and chief
executive officer Edward Rudner, architect of the line's anti-agent
policies.
President Richard Kirby and executive vice president-marketing
Frank Del Rio were named co-CEOs. Renaissance board member Fred
Kleisner, who is also president of Wyndham, became the line's
nonexecutive chairman. The commission rate was bumped up to 10% and
the marketing strategy is being revised to include and embrace the
travel agent community.
Renaissance appears to be doing a 180.
It's one thing for a supplier to take agents for granted. In an
imperfect world, that happens from time to time. But for a long
time it seemed that Renaissance was deliberately antagonizing
travel agents, a policy that, frankly, never made any business
sense to us, whether the line has no ships on order or a
hundred.
The line's recent ad campaign was designed to patch things up,
but, judging from the mail we received, it was not an unbridled
success. Some agents, in fact, castigated this newspaper for
accepting Renaissance's advertising.
Clearly, Renaissance dug itself into a hole and it's going to
have to do a lot more than it has already done to get out of it.
It's going to have to listen to agents.
And agents will have to listen back.
Renaissance and the nation's travel agents can have a
cooperative relationship governed by sound business practices and a
realistic understanding of what they can do for each other, or they
can have an antagonistic relationship governed by the baggage of
history, emotion and ill-will.
We'd prefer option one, but for a decade that option hasn't even
been on the table. Now for the first time, it may be within reach.
That would be progress.