NEW YORK -- Cruise lines are tapping into the growing market for
meetings and incentives by designing ships with increasingly
sophisticated business amenities, according to the Cruise Lines
International Association.
Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the array of
high-tech communications equipment being packed into the dedicated
ship meeting facilities, CLIA said in a report related to its
"National Cruise Vacation Month" promotion in February.
The promotion's motto is: "You haven't lived until you've
cruised."
The increasing expense being devoted to lavish meeting
facilities at sea stems from the growth in the market for shipboard
meetings, which more than doubled from 1991 to 1997, according to
the most recent biennial study of Meetings & Conventions
magazine.
According the publication, corporations spent $42.9 million
hosting 7,600 events at sea in 1997, compared with only $20.3
million in 1991, with 6,000 meetings at sea.
Driving this boom, according to CLIA president Jim Godsman, is
the satisfaction of meeting planners in turning seaward.
"What they're discovering," he said, "is that when they hold an
event on a cruise ship, everyone is pleased -- the bosses, because
the price is right, and the employees, because the cruise
experience exceeds their expectations.
"Meeting attendees also can bring along their families," he
added. "While the employees attend meetings, their families enjoy
the ship's many activities -- and at the end of the day, everyone
is reunited for dinner."
Incentive cruises, which are purchased by companies to use as
rewards for outstanding performance, represent another hefty
segment of the market, Godsman said.
According to a study by the Incentive Federation, for example,
cruises represent 24% of the travel packages being offered to
top-producing employees.
The motivation for employees to strive to win a cruise stems
from the high interest in cruising among consumers in general,
Godsman added.
"There aren't many prizes that motivate more than a cruise," he
said. "Given the opportunity to win one, people tend to work
especially hard."
As the meetings and incentives markets have grown, the days of
squeezing a corporate event into a cruise ship's dining room
between lunch and dinner are long gone.
During the 1990s alone, cruise lines spent lavishly in designing
vessels with dedicated meeting space, conference halls and business
amenities, CLIA noted.
In the first wave of construction early in the 1990s, the
facilities included such on-land standards as audiovisual
equipment, fax machines, flip charts and easels, microphones, copy
machines and walkie-talkies.
Some lines even provided secretaries, language translators and
meeting coordinators. But as the market accelerated in growth
during the last years of the decade, a growing number of cruise
ships began to sport the latest in communications and PC
capabilities, including e-mail, cellular phones with long-distance
capability, in-cabin data lines and even laptop rentals.
"What this means," said Godsman, "is that anyone who feels the
need to stay in contact with someone from home or office will have
plenty of ways to do so on a cruise. On the other hand," he added,
"those who wish to truly leave the world behind need never go near
a phone or a fax."
This seeming paradox is a fairly recent phenomenon, according to
Marc Mancini, a consultant who specializes in travel industry
concerns.
"Communication from ship to shore," he said, "was
technologically awkward and fairly expensive until recently.
"For these reasons, many lines didn't offer much in the way of
communications -- and there weren't many complaints from passengers
who wanted to get away from it all," Mancini added.
But that is changing because, as technology progresses, people
are being conditioned to keep in touch with the rest of the
world.
"So many people enjoy that, while others want to escape it." The
former, according to Mancini, will be sure to seek out the variety
of business equipment on board -- from phones, fax machines,
computers and e-mail, to conference rooms and language translation
facilities.
"The bottom line," Mancini added, "is that if you would be at a
loss without constant communications, it is available on a cruise
ship."