Ken Potrock
Last week, Adventures by Disney decided to shake up the river cruising status quo by partnering with AmaWaterways on five family-friendly Danube River sailings. Travel Weekly's Michelle Baran caught up with Ken Potrock, senior vice president and general manager for Adventures by Disney, to find out why he thinks Disney can make kids and river cruising fit together.
Q: What would you say to critics who contend that river cruising is not a very kid-friendly form of travel?
A: You hear a lot about the fact that it's for an older clientele and that the ships have been built with an older clientele in mind ... We worked with the AmaWaterways team to really begin challenging the status quo. One part of the status quo is you're sailing and you're looking at the beautiful views. Well, that's fine, and we've allowed for some of that, but the family market wants to be more active. So, the first thing we've done is we've really looked at the itinerary, and what we're doing is traveling mostly at night, we're getting into ports in the morning and we're not leaving the ports typically until midnight, which assures so much more time in these towns and cities ... We're offering two, three, four different kinds of activities each and every day in each and every port ... We know we have active kids and they want to burn off energy. So we've scouted out parks in each of these towns and cities we go into. We're going to have our adventure guides lead a group of kids and families that want to go to the park [to play] soccer or Frisbee, and we're equipping our adventure guides with all of those tools.
Q: How are you marketing and selling the river cruises?
A: [There are] a lot of travel agents that are in the river cruise category. It's a bigger category than the family adventure tour business. So there are more travel agents that are interested in this particular category ... Agents that were primarily handling Disney product, they're incredibly excited because most of them have not handled river cruising and that opens up a whole new portfolio of product for them. If you talk to people who are primarily in the cruise category and the river cruise category, maybe some of the Ama agents, they were incredibly excited to cross over and reach the family audience ... From a results perspective, we're already seeing a shift to more of the bookings coming in from the travel agent community than we've seen previously.
Q: Where do you see this venture heading?
A: My hope would be that the concept or the question you started with, is river cruising ever going to be for families, will quickly get answered by the satisfaction of the people that try our product. I think that will be good for us, because it leads to our ability to expand. It will be good for AmaWaterways, because it broadens their appeal, and I think it will be good for the river cruising industry that will likely quickly look at this and say, 'Wow, what do we need to do to be more welcoming to families?' So I think it's good for everyone involved.
Q: What has been the response thus far?
A: I would tell you that we are very pleased with the reaction we're getting, both on the booking side but also on the inquiry and information searching side. We've seen a substantial uptick in the mix of where these bookings and inquiries are coming from, with that shift being more pronounced for the travel agent community.