Andy Stuart, executive vice president of global sales for Norwegian Cruise Line, is the point person in Norwegian's 3-year-old Partners First trade campaign. Stuart has been shepherding the consolidation of various online platforms into a single portal called Norwegian Central, which recently debuted. He spoke with cruise editor Tom Stieghorst about its development.
Q: Why put together this portal?
A: To simplify things for travel partners. Before the portal, there were lots of different parts to deal with. The other thing is, there were a lot of tools that travel agents simply weren't finding. It's one thing to say, OK, it's hard work to get there. But we were investing in all these things that some travel partners were just never getting to. The idea is, you give them one place to go for everything, they'll get to the things they want to do, but they'll also find things we've developed that they didn't hear about.
Q: What components were brought into the portal?
A: The three big things are BookNCL.com, which is anything related to the transaction; Marketing Headquarters, which provides the ability to access marketing tools; and NCL University, which is the training, certification and engagement tool. Previously you'd go a different path to get to each of the three.
Q: How long have you been working on it?
A: A long time. In earnest, probably about 18 months. We had a pretty big exercise with travel partners. They really helped design it in a way that would be user-friendly, and they persuaded us to delay it, because they felt it wasn't going to be best in class the first time we showed it to them.
Q: What's an example of how this makes things easier for the agent?
A: Once a travel partner has visited NCL U., I hope after they've completed, say, a module on Alaska, the natural thinking is to say, "Now how do I take that out to a customer?" Previously the travel agent would have to come out of NCL U. and think, "Where do I go now?" On the portal, there's a home page, they'll go back to that and then straight to Marketing Headquarters. They can pick Alaska, and then build a whole promotion on Alaska.
Q: What was the most controversial thing about developing this new portal?
A: I suppose the fact that it has taken so long. It was overdue. It's probably a tool that should have been developed earlier. When we developed Marketing Headquarters, or even NCL U., the fact that we developed an individual path for it was misguided. We should have built one URL, and then built all of the tools under the umbrella.
Q: How does this fit into the larger effort to digitize relations with the trade?
A: Our focus is to deal with people [the way] they want to deal with us. Our approach has been to develop tools that get people excited to deal with us online, as opposed to forcing people to deal with us online. You have to make sure you've got a great tool that people want to use before you say, "You've got to do this." We absolutely want people to deal with us online, because in the end we think it's better for them, for the customer and for us. But we've got to make sure we've invested in the right tools, the right technology, that leaves somebody coming away from that transaction saying, "Wow, that was great, I want to do more business with these guys because they have great technology."
Follow Tom Stieghorst on Twitter @tstravelweekly.