Thursday, November 24, 2016

Fathom cruises going away, but brand remains for excursions

Fathom’s only ship, the Adonia, will be returned to the P&O Cruises fleet in June 2017. Photo Credit: Tom Stieghorst

Fathom, the one-ship cruise line created by Carnival Corp. in 2015 to offer social-impact cruises, will become a shoreside-only experience in mid-2017, a Carnival spokesman said.

The brand’s only ship, the Adonia, will be returned to the P&O Cruises fleet in June 2017.

The company noted that the Fathom experience had been expanded recently to other brands calling at the Carnival-owned Amber Cove port on the north coast of the Dominican Republic.

Seven of Carnival Corp.’s 10 brands visit Amber Cove. Besides Fathom, they are Carnival Cruise Line, Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, Costa Cruises, Aida Cruises and P&O Cruises (UK). 

After starting cruises to the Dominican Republic in April 2016, Fathom in May became the first ship to take passengers on regularly scheduled cruises between the U.S and Cuba in more than 50 years.

Roger Frizzell, Carnival Corp.'s chief information officer, said, “We plan to continue sailing to Cuba for many years to come based on the success of our first cruises to the country, which have proven extremely successful.”

With the Adonia returning to P&O, one option would be for Carnival Corp. to substitute a ship from one of its other brands, such as Carnival Cruise Line, as the designated carrier to Cuba.

Frizzell said Carnival Corp. has requested approval from Cuba to sail there with other brands, beginning in June 2017.

The Cuba cruises differ from Fathom’s social-impact cruises to the Dominican Republic because they must conform to the “people-to-people” travel rules that govern American travel to Cuba. Although liberalized under the Obama administration, the rules still require tourism activities to fit into one of 12 categories that promote the exchange of experiences, such as educational, cultural or charitable activities.

Fathom was the first new brand created by Carnival Corp. since the 1990s that was not part of a joint venture with another company. Its social-impact mission, spearheaded by Fathom president Tara Russell and supported by Carnival Corp. CEO Arnold Donald, was intended to capitalize on an interest in voluntourism.

However, demand for Fathom’s Cuba cruises outstripped demand for the Dominican Republic sailings, as reflected in the prices. Weeklong Cuba cruises start at about $ 1,800 per person on Fathom, while cruises of equal length to the Dominican Republic have sold for as little as $ 199.

Frizzell said Carnival hopes to expand the Fathom experience to other markets in the future.


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Wednesday, November 23, 2016

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Reddie takes up senior role with FCM Travel Solutions in US

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Reddie takes up senior role with FCM Travel Solutions in US

FCM Travel Solutions has announced the appointment of Scott Reddie to the role of global director of account management.

Reddie will be based in Philadelphia, United States of America.

He has over 16 years in the travel industry and has worked across wholesale, reservations, travel media and adventure travel before moving into the corporate sector.

He first started with the Flight Centre Travel Group, owners of FCM, in 2010 as a business development manager for Corporate Traveller in Brisbane, Australia.

Reddie then joined FCM in an account management role managing key state accounts.

In November 2012 he relocated from Australia to the USA in an account management role, managing some of FCM's key global accounts out of Boston.

Since relocating, Reddie has worked in various positions supporting FCM's growth in the USA and most recently relocated to San Francisco to focus on high-growth West Coast markets.

The global director of account management role will build relationships with multi-national clients at all levels to demonstrate FCM's service levels and ensure high customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The role is pivotal in understanding our customer's needs and evolving the travel management offering to continue to add value to clients. 

"We are delighted about Scott's appointment – with his vast experience and knowledge in travel and program management he will be a great asset to FCM and play a key role in our development strategy," said Marcus Eklund, global leader, FCM Travel Solutions.

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Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Demand and inventory, a delicate balancing act

Michelle Baran

When you have more bookings than you know what to do with, that’s the good kind of problem to have in the travel industry, right?

Well, sort of. No travel company ever wants to have too many empty beds/seats/cabins. But not having enough openings to meet demand, that’s a tricky problem too, because that’s when you risk losing clients to the competition.

And when demand is a bit in flux, as it currently is in the river cruise market, it’s hard to plan for unknown growth and an unknown future. For those watching closely, you may have noticed that shipbuilding momentum has eased up in the river cruise industry. Viking River Cruises is only building two ships next year, down from the six it debuted this year, 12 last and the record 18 the company launched in 2014.

AmaWaterways too is only launching one new vessel each in 2017 and in 2018 (the company typically launches two each year). And Avalon Waterways doesn’t have any new ships planned for 2017, after several years of consistently building two or three vessels annually. The shipbuilding frenzy clearly has died down a bit for now, even as some newer players (I’m looking at you, Crystal) have entered the market.

But then there is the issue of pent-up demand following a softer year such as the one the river cruise market just experienced, driven by the terror attacks in Paris and Nice and by high water levels that disrupted some departures. River cruisers who put off the popular travel style in 2016 may now be looking to get onboard in 2017.

Noting pent-up demand from the U.S. market and on the heels of two promising future booking months, AmaWaterways this month announced its 2018 sailings are open for booking. And several other river cruise lines have been promoting their 2018 availability as well. If there really was some pent-up demand as AmaWaterways claims, a shipbuilding slowdown could potentially create a capacity bottleneck that might force river cruise lines to offer up 2018 cabins as an overflow alternative to 2017.

Then again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This past year was a challenging one, and river cruise lines will likely be happy to simply fill their 2017 inventory at higher capacity levels than they did in 2016. If demand for river cruising returns with a fervor strong enough to have some river cruise lines regretting they didn’t put in some additional ship orders, that is a problem they would probably prefer to have over figuring out how to fill empty ships.


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Monday, November 21, 2016

Phocuswright's Innovation Summit rewards thinking smaller

LOS ANGELES — The 2016 Phocuswright Conference last week placed a spotlight on niche travel-technology companies as alternatives to the raft of general digital-travel-planning startups.

The event, which drew 1,800 attendees to the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live, also feted tech firms offering services ranging from a revenue-management programming tool for vacation-rental property owners to vacation-financing services to digital concierge services for boutique and independent hotels.

While at least a dozen of the 47 fledgling travel-tech companies competing in the conference’s Innovation Summit forum pitched a variation of the digital travel assistant/booking service, the forum’s judges appeared to dismiss the theory pitched by those companies that prospective travelers don’t enjoy shopping around for travel choices.

Instead, the judges rewarded companies that took a smaller-picture approach to travel growth.

Amid that backdrop, Hello Scout, the digital-concierge service that specializes in sourcing and servicing in-destination attractions for independent hotels, won both the conference’s General Catalyst award, which included a $ 100,000 prize, and the runner-up vote among the startup companies in the conference’s Innovation Summit competition.

Beyond Pricing, the revenue-management company, won the Innovation Summit’s startup category, while Local Measure, a social-media aggregation tool that hotel companies can use to better serve their guests, took the Innovation Summit’s top prize among emerging companies. The runner-up in that category was Uplift, which provides low-interest loans for prospective travelers.

Beyond Pricing “took a problem that everyone in the audience already knew existed, which is that you can make more money if you price your properties better,” Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein, one of the forum’s judges, said in an interview. “They applied that to a vertical that has historically not had great pricing, and they showed how that software solved it better.”

The glut of travel-planning pitches and some of the resulting pushback from panel judges appeared to reveal a travel-technology sector rife with consolidation, where many of the travel-tech firms have been snapped up by the largest players.

Notably, Expedia completed its $ 3.9 billion acquisition of vacation-rentals listing service HomeAway last December after acquiring smaller OTA Orbitz Worldwide for $ 1.6 billion just four months earlier.

Those acquisitions followed up Priceline Group’s buyouts of the metasearch company Kayak in 2013 and restaurant-reservations service OpenTable the following year.

“There was a theory, maybe two or three years ago, that you can build a new channel for mobile because maybe the traditional players aren’t going into that space,” said John Kim, who will succeed HomeAway co-founder Brian Sharples as CEO in January. “All of those opportunities seem to be closing down one by one.”

The judges also appeared to take issue with many of the company founders’ claims that most travelers dislike spending time researching trips and are on the prowl for all-in-one digital-booking services.

“It’s a fallacy that people don’t like searching,” panel judge Rod Cuthbert, CEO of Rome2Rio and founder of Viator, said in response to one of the firm’s presentations. “People visit 28 sites because they like it.”

The judges appeared to engage is some pushback against companies whose founders pitched business plans that merely appealed to millennials, whose influence on travel spending continues to grow.

“It drives me crazy when people say: my market is millennials,” forum judge Jim Hornthal, chairman of Triporati and founder of Preview Travel (which later merged with Travelocity), said in an interview. “There’s a 20-year-old fraternity brother at the University of Alabama who sleeps in until noon because he likes to drink, and that’s a millennial. And there’s a 26-year-old attorney in Manhattan, she’s married with one infant, and her husband’s a surgeon, and she’s a millennial. What do those two have in common?”

The judges appeared to favor companies willing to take a smaller slice of the $ 1.3 trillion global travel sector, leaving the broader digital-booking services to larger, more established companies and focusing on areas such as vacation-rental revenue management, destination-activity sourcing and onsite travel-supplier services.

“A lot of judges are suckers for unsexy pitches,” said Goldstein, whose metasearch company was acquired by Concur in September. “If they were sexy and exciting, chances are that one of the existing companies would’ve done it already.

Phocuswright is owned by Travel Weekly parent Northstar Travel Group.


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Sunday, November 20, 2016

Local restaurants on St. Thomas walking tours

St. Thomas Food Tours, a cultural-food tour company on St. Thomas, is offering two new guided walking tours of downtown Charlotte Amalie and the Frenchtown area that feature tastings at local restaurants mixed with island history and culture along the way.

The tastings offer items such as tropical iced tea, rum cake, conch fritters, plantain, curry chicken and rice and peas.
Tours are run year-round and are priced at $ 70 for adults, $ 60 for those between 12 and 18 years of age, and $ 50 for kids under 12.

The Historic Main Street Tour, which operates Monday through Saturday, starts at 10 a.m. at the entrance of Main Street, a five-minute cab ride from the cruise docks.

Sites include My Brother’s Workshop Bakery for coconut rum cake, Cuzzin’s for sweet potato pie, Meson Amalia for tapas and seafood, Arc Vodka distillery to sample bay-leaf infused vodka, Big Kahuna Shack for a Bushwacker rum drink and E’s Garden Teahouse for saltfish and tea.

The Frenchtown Tour departs Monday through Friday at 3 p.m. from the seaplane terminal on the waterfront. Stops are made at local eateries for seafood, soup, flatbread and deserts as well as a visit to the Frenchtown Museum.


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Saturday, November 19, 2016

Naples Beach Hotel creates package to show off redesigned golf course

The Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club in southwest Florida is putting the finishing touches on the renovation — what it’s saying is almost a reinvention — of its championship golf course. The redesign of the resort's course began in April, and it reopened on Nov. 17.

The course was redesigned with input from golf icon and acclaimed course designer Jack Nicklaus, who has a historical tie to the resort. The Jack Nicklaus redesign was done in collaboration with noted course architect John Sanford of Sanford Golf Design. This major $ 9 million project follows $ 50 million in impressive renovations and enhancements at the resort over the last few years.

In conjunction with the reopening, the resort is offering a Golf by the Gulf package. Available Dec. 1 to April 30, the package includes: green fees, cart rental, bag storage, range balls and golf gratuities.

The plan is available for one golfer, two golfers or for one golfer and one nongolfer. A two-night minimum is required, and the cart rental is shared for the two golfers package. Also, the one golfer and one nongolfer package includes a 50-minute massage at the resort's full-service spa for the nongolfer. Guests at the resort receive complimentary valet parking and self-parking and access to the resort's fitness center. Also of note: the property does not charge a resort fee.

The one golfer package starts at $ 399 per night, the two golfers package starts at $ 553 per night and the one golfer and one nongolfer plan starts at $ 555 per night. 

The AAA Four-Diamond resort, which also features a tennis center, can be booked at http://www.naplesbeachhotel.com/.


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