Bret Gordon, a former Vantage Deluxe World Travel executive, is one of the river cruise industry's latest newcomers, and when he struck out on his own a couple years ago, he wanted to change a few things about the way he was doing business in the river cruise market.
Gordon wanted to enhance online booking technology of river cruising and increase back-of-house efficiencies. He also wanted to work more closely with agents.
Speaking of companies that focus on direct-to-consumer marketing, Gordon said those lines shy away from agents because "they think, they've spent all this money to acquire the customer just to have the customer go to a travel agent, and now you're adding a commission on top of that."
He added: "I'm not going to pay the highest commissions in the world, but we're trying to pay a fair commission. We're trying to make things easy, to take the hassle away. I think that's a fair partnership."
Since leaving Vantage as COO in 2012, Gordon launched Tom Harper River Journeys in 2013, which sells space on various river cruise ships throughout Europe and Asia. Last year, Gordon introduced Amras Cruises, a Boston-based river cruise company that serves as the U.S. distributor of Austrian company Luftner Cruises' Amadeus fleet of river vessels.
Last fall, Amras, a more upscale product than Tom Harper, linked up with Celebrity Cruises to create ocean/river cruise packages, a coupling that according to Gordon has been extremely well received.
With Tom Harper, Gordon said the company uses a cloud-based back-of-house technology that enables it to operate without a large IT department. That keeps system costs relatively low while at the same time giving the company the ability to add itineraries as soon as inventory becomes available.
"It allows us to move very quickly," Gordon said. "We can get a product up and running in 24 hours after we've contracted it."
What travelers and agents see on the website is exactly what the reservation agent sees. In fact, the reservation agent uses the website to make the actual booking, because there isn't a separate reservation system. About a third of the company's customers book online, Gordon said, adding, "which is exciting for me, especially for this demographic."
With the success he is seeing at both Amras and Tom Harper, Gordon said he expects to get into the river ship-building game, as well. Starting next year, Tom Harper will have its own ships in Europe, too, he said.