Abandoning air-purchase clients damages cruise line reputations
When I joined the industry in 1988, at Crystal Cruises, the relationship between cruise lines, travel agents and the customer was an open topic. Some thought we were the customer's representative, some thought the travel agent was.
I do not recall any case that went to court, even after it was determined essentially that a travel agency was the representative of the cruise line.
Thus I found Mark Pestronk's column [Legal Briefs: "Cruise lines' ticket disclaimers not meant to protect agencies"] and Charlie Funk's column [It's Like This: "A tale of two cruise lines"] an interesting study in contrasts in the May 10 issue. One looks at it from a legal point of view, the other from a practical point of view.
I do not have all the facts in the cases illustrated by Charlie, for whom I have always had tremendous respect, and I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not taking this from a legal point of view.
But if a traveler, using a travel agency, books a cruise and air through a cruise line, there should be a certain expectation as to what they are getting.
I find it unfathomable and inexcusable that a cruise line could sell a cruise-and-air package and then wash its hands of the whole thing if the air equation goes wrong. Yes, it can be a problem. It can be a pain in the butt. But the cruise line sells the air, and with that goes a certain amount of responsibility.
The cruise line might be legally protected, but come on now: Where's the humanity in this situation? People spend a lot of money and then get left high and dry (pun intended). Maybe the cruise line is protected legally, but it's not protected when it comes to its reputation or the chance of getting future business.
Kudos to the lines that step up, and boo-hiss! to those that do not.
Art Sbarsky
[The writer, a former executive with several cruise lines, is now a travel journalist.]
E-docs pad profits of cruise lines at expense of agents and clients
I run a full-service travel agency, and the service we provide is what keeps our clients coming back and sending us their friends.
Our cruise line "partners" tell us that our clients want to print e-docs and head off to the pier, that they are doing us a favor by not sending us proper, professional-looking documents. But in fact, it's all about their bottom line.
My clients (and I suppose many other agents' clients) expect to sit at my desk, review their documents and get some advice. And maybe even get real baggage tags.
Let's label the change for what it is: The cruise lines have moved the cost of printing and distributing documents to the travel agency community. They saw a chance to cut their costs, and they are saving millions.
In the meantime, we agents are spending hundreds of dollars per agency to present our clients with second-rate documents. You can print them in color, but they still look like a stack of paper and nothing else.
Bob Silverman, president
Majors Travel of New Dorp
New York
ARC's PayABill is 'Rosetta stone' of travel agents' digital invoicing
If, as Richard Turen suggests in "Rethink the lowly invoice" [Reality Check, May 3], the time-honored invoice has its roots in ancient Egypt, then ARC's PayABill is the Rosetta stone that unites many entities, saving agents from the confusion and hassle brought on by a paper process.
ARC heard our agent and tour operator customers' grief with a paper invoice process involving multiple hotel entities and a crazy mosaic of remittance and settlement terms. We saw it as a natural opportunity to contribute with our experience in settlement systems to the benefit of the agent, tour operator and hotels.
Tour operators and hotels rolled up their sleeves along with ARC staff as we developed ARC PayABill, which consolidates multiple supplier invoices into an online format featuring multiple payment options as well as dispute-resolution mechanisms.
ARC PayABill began by linking hotels and tour operators, but why not also link tour operators and travel agents?
Gone are the days of stacks of different kinds of paper invoices, and here is a mechanism for electronic settlement of multiple supplier invoices: See www.arccorp.com/solutions/payabill.jsp.
What a difference a few thousand years can make.
Leslie Gilpatrick, general manager,reporting and settlement
Allan Muten, director,strategic communications
ARC
Arlington, Va.
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