While many cruise sellers have expressed disappointment with the decision by Carnival Corp.'s North American brands to prohibit travel agencies from bidding on their brand names as search-engine keywords, others welcome it as leveling the playing field.
Which is why some agencies last week said they were actually happy about the new policy.
Starting Jan. 1, cruise sellers were no longer allowed to bid on keywords using brand names or other phrases trademarked by Carnival Cruise Lines, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Cunard Line and Seabourn Cruises.
The brands said they were imposing the rules to eliminate confusion when consumers search for their brands online. Holland America and Princess also said they didn't want to compete against travel agents for links based on their own trademarks, which makes the links more expensive.
But because branded keywords are very expensive to bid on, few agencies will actually change what they are doing.
Until Jan. 1, travel agencies had been allowed to bid on cruise lines' brand names so that if someone searched for "Carnival cruises" or "Holland America Line," for example, a link to the agency's website would show up among the top sponsored links listed on the results page, along with links to Carnival.com and HollandAmerica.com.
Most agencies can't afford to bid on branded keywords such as Carnival, Princess or Royal Caribbean.
At current rates on Google, a sponsored link using the phrase "carnival cruises," costs the sponsor just under $3 every time a consumer clicks on it.
The site pays that fee whether a visitor ends up booking a cruise with them or leaves the site after a few seconds.
And since the odds of someone booking a cruise through any one click are small, the agency has to have very high volume to justify a sponsored link.
"Keyword prices are so insane that there is just no way for an agency to ever make money on a lead they finally close, regardless of how long they keep the client and how many times they sell them," said one cruise seller.
Charlie Funk, owner of Just Cruisin' Plus in Nashville, reported in his Travel Weekly column last month that a few years ago, purchasing keywords for search-engine optimization was considered "the marketing tool of the future."
But today, the costs have run so high, he wrote, that the conversion of clicks to bookings can run as high as 200-to-1.
"It's easy to understand why few agencies are big players," Funk wrote. "A decent-size sale produces $270 in commission but costs $150 to $1,600 to generate."
Christy Jourdan, marketing director for Ships and Trips Travel in Sacramento, Calif., said that for an agency like hers, the prohibition actually levels the playing field a bit.
"If I Google 'Carnival cruises,' my agency is not going to come up," she said. "My agency will come up somewhere in the thousands."
She said that with fewer agencies able to buy the "premium real estate" on search engines, some of that business might now go to her.
"I can't bid to place myself up there with America's Vacation Center," she said. "I have nothing against them; they are a great player. But we are a boutique agency, and we offer a boutique level of service.
"And our [cruise] prices are the same. But if someone is Googling for price or a name, we won't be found that way because we aren't big enough to compete in that arena."
Jourdan was also among the travel agents who said they understood that the Carnival brands' decision was based on the reasoning that the brands own their trademarks and shouldn't have to bid on using them.
Or, as Funk wrote, the Carnival brands "don't understand the logic of having to pay outrageously high click rates for the brand names they own."
P.J. Cammarata, a managing partner with Internet marketer ThinkBigSites.com, said, "As Carnival eliminates most if not all of its paid search competition for keyword phrases that include the word 'Carnival,' they could expect to significantly cut their online marketing costs and therefore increase their sponsored link return on investment in a big way."
Many agencies compete not for branded keywords like Holland America and Cunard, but for the less expensive, generic terms like "cruise," "cruise vacation" or "cruise lines."
The big players in that area have expressed concern that prices for those keywords could increase substantially as a result of top agencies no longer being able to bid on brand names as keywords.
The generic terms also generate substantial returns for sponsored link buyers. According to Alexa.com, which provides information on website traffic and statistics, of the top five Web search terms that drive traffic to Carnival.com, Carnival Cruise Lines' website, two -- "cruises" and "cruise" -- are generic.
Many agents are now worried that prices for generic keywords will go up.
"The online players will shift the dollars to other channels as nonbranded keywords or third-party email, like Travelzoo or Cruise Critic," predicted Steven Hattem, vice president of marketing for CruiseOne and Cruises Inc. "This increased demand will increase the costs for everyone."
Cammarata said that no matter where a travel agency stands on this debate, one thing does not change with Carnival brands' new rules: An agency's best chance for a good return on investment is to try to achieve the highest possible organic search results, which generate up to five times as much Web traffic as sponsored links produce.
And high organic ranking can be achieved, Cammarata said, using trademarked phrases within the marketing content on their websites.
Agencies, he said, "can either continue their paid search efforts using only generic phrases such as 'cruise vacations' or get themselves highly ranked organically for competitive keyword phrases that include the word 'Carnival.' In a perfect world, these companies would engage a blended Internet marketing approach by employing both."