More Travel Industry Developements...
I had promised to follow up about the interview with YTB Travel Network President Kim Sorensen in Travel Trade within a day or two, and am working on this follow up currently. I found an interesting piece this morning that I also wanted to bring to light. A few weeks ago I posted about Company President, Kevin Kelly with Cruises Etc. who came up with an approach to educate a consumer and help them become independent contractors and sell cruises for MyCruiseBookings.com.
Travel Weekly has done a follow up on what's transpired since this announcement was first made back on November 28th and I wanted to make some observations.
It's important to note that both Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean Cruises have severed it's relationship with MyCruiseBookings.com. While Mr. Kelly discussed it's plans with Regional District Sales Managers of the cruise lines, explaining that his concept was to acquire more people to sell their products, because of the barrage of complaints from how this concept was perceived by our Traditional Agents there has been an abrupt about face.
Traditional Agents have inundated both Mr. Kelly and these same cruise lines with nasty e-mails and flat out accused him of not only running a card mill but charged him with rebating and being a Multi-Level Marketing company.
Mr. Kelly, welcome to my little corner of the world.
Like me, Mr. Kelly is overwhelmed with how "abrasive" our Traditional Agent have been. I hear complaints about us YTB'ers being so vocal, but in all honesty, I see far too many examples of our counterparts in this industry being just down right foul and rude. I don't know if anyone has noticed since I last posted about Vicki Freed, and how vile our Traditional Agents have been when posting comments on her Blog, but it got so bad she's deleted all comments on her Blog. I can't speak for Vicki, but I can tell you personally, I was ashamed at how rude and abusive some of the comments were to such a high level Executive.
Other areas of note lately concern the harsh language in the MLM and Affiliates Forum on Travel Weekly itself with several discussions being closed by TravelWeekly.com Administrators in the interest of restoring decorum to the Forum. Most of the MLM type affiliates have been run off on this forum and it's been overrun with "Traditional Agents" who do nothing more than complain, bicker, and cry about how bad the MLM business model is in their view. (It was already closed once, and it looks like it needs to be closed once again.)
This does not exempt those of us in YTB, as John has commented on his Blog, we still have our issues, but I hope that some can appreciate a little better just why I monitor the comments made on this Blog.
From my point of view concerning the MyCruiseBookings model, the only area that may be in question is the rebating issue. It's noted in this article however that Mr. Kelly did a little ghost-shopping of these same critics posing as a prospective client with an offer from another agency for a discounted cruise, and in every case these agencies were willing to offer a 10% discount. I've been to enough seminars and supplier trainings to know that this is a HUGE problem for suppliers, and it's not limited to the Cruise Industry. This spring Sandals made a point of this same issue when they toured the country with their multi-million dollar upgrades to their resorts.
If suppliers are going to crack down on rebating, then it needs to be industry wide. It's a gross injustice that those that are accusing for rebating cruises to clients are doing it themselves, and I can assure you, it is going on, and it is a problem.
As to the accusations of MyCruiseBookings being either a card mill or MLM, I see no evidence of either with this model. Again, in my corner of the world, I seen too many examples of people making blanket statements like this without being properly informed themselves about what the terminology actually means. Mr. Kelly makes no claims of anyone in the company holding any type of credentials with the $20 monthly fee, nor is anyone outside of Mr. Kelly compensated for anything other than selling cruises and making a commission.
While Mr. Kelly saw an opportunity to transform a percentage of the 91 million Americans who were already spending $68 Billion on the internet from a customer to a business owner, in an industry segment who has already lost that business to begin with, these "Agents" feel offended and are crying foul.
MyCruiseBookings.com and Cruises Etc in no way intends to undermine the professional travel agent. Instead they are trying to recruit and train a new wave of travel sales professionals. They strongly feel that the cruise travel industry needs a new influx of fresh ideas from the travel agent community to match those of the cruise lines themselves who continue to grow, evolve and thrive; bringing forth new concepts in cruising.
Sound similar to what someone else quoted back in early October?
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Labels: Card Mill, Royal Caribbean, Travel Weekly, YTB Travel
One does not know what Mr. Kelley told to the BDMs about his new program. And again, I would be naive if I thought that NCL and RCCL made the move based on some nasty emails. But if you look at the original release by Kelley--it most definitely was about rebating. Now there is a bit of re-evaluation going on to see if the model can be tweaked. You also did not mention that Carnival also shut them off.
I agree that Vicki's blog got a little out of hand. But from what she told me, the comments were deleted because she wanted to re-focus the blog on sales. I am sure the deletion served a dual purpose as well.
I know you linked to a statistic on how many million people booked. Again, I have not seen that number, but I find the 91M a little high--almost 1/3 the population of the US? A little far fetched when you consider the number of many are children, the infirm ,and the ones that cannot afford to travel or simply do not like to travel. Were there 91M bookings last year? Sure I buy that 100%. BUt I also say that most were likely to be airline tickets followed by car reservations and hotels -- direct with the vendor. Maybe it is 91M that investigated or researched travel online. I dunno.
Posted by
John |
Thursday, December 13, 2007
John;
I was made aware of Vicki’s new direction by one of you other colleagues and based one of Vicki’s recent posts, I would agree with both of you. Regardless of the reasons why Vicki deleted comments on her Blog, it does not excuse the treatment of a high level Executive. Being in the limelight the way you are, I know you know how disturbing comments like the ones she had to read are.
People loose sight far too easily that while we are talking about a very heated topic, the only way to get through it is by effective communication on both sides.
You might want to check with your Syndication Counterpart, James Gilden about the 91 Million Internet Users and $68 Billion in revenue, those are his figures from the U.S. Census Bureau he has posted on his site, not any of the Kool-Aid poured by any Network Marketing Travel Company.
Posted by
TravelPro |
Thursday, December 13, 2007