Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines 2011 Annual Report Download - page 22

2011 ANNUAL REPORT 18
PART I
each brand and provide support to the travel agency
community. Our website Cruisingpower.com continues
to be an industry-leading website exclusive to the
travel agency community. Royal Caribbean International
continues to enhance its online training certification
program, “University of Wow,” and Celebrity Cruises
continues to promote “Five Star Academy,” its online
travel agent partner learning suite. In addition, over
the past several years, we have completed several key
enhancements to simplify the online booking process
via our CruiseMatch trade booking tool based on
feedback from our travel agent partners.
We have in place a virtual tradeshow platform, pro-
viding travel agents the opportunity to attend a Royal
Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises or Azamara
Club Cruises tradeshow event by logging in from their
own computer. These events consist of online training
sessions, online general sessions with keynote speakers
and online tradeshow booths all designed to educate,
motivate and inform travel agents about our brands.
We have customer service representatives that are
trained to assist travel agents in providing a higher
level of service, and Insight, the first service tool of its
kind in the industry, assists agencies with productivity
and enhances customer service. Celebrity Cruises
provides sales and marketing support to travel agents
through its program, “The Celebrity Commitment,”
whereby every travel agent partner in the United
States and Canada has a dedicated sales manager
who helps them grow their business. In addition, we
currently operate reservation call centers to support
our travel agent community in the United States,
Canada, France, Spain, China, Singapore, Brazil,
Mexico, Germany, Norway, France and the United
Kingdom which allow us to provide flexible and
extended hours of operations.
We also have certified vacation planners in our call
centers located throughout the world offering cruise
planning expertise and personal attention to our
guests. We maintain websites that allow guests to plan
and book a cruise and customize their reservations
for Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises
and Azamara Club Cruises. During 2011, we enhanced
our Royal Caribbean International and Celebrity Cruises
Spanish language sites in our Latin American markets,
which allow for guests from countries in these markets
to complete their entire booking process online. In
addition, in order to support our direct sales initiative
and to process inbound phone reservation requests
from all markets, we created a Consumer Outreach
department, which provides 24-hour access to certi-
fied vacation planners, group vacation planners and
customer service agents.
We place a significant focus on building strong rela-
tionships with our guests before, during and after their
cruise vacation with the objective of establishing cus-
tomer engagement and continued loyalty. As part of
this focus, we established ongoing social media plat-
forms to increase awareness for both repeat and new
guests and we emphasized marketing through our
loyalty programs. As a result, we continue to experi-
ence an increase in the use of our internet sites and
consumer outreach centers as a source of our overall
bookings. In 2011, we also enhanced the Pullmantur
website, www.pullmantur.es to include booking capa-
bilities, which enable guests to plan and book a cruise
and customize their reservation. Guests can also book
their cruise vacations onboard our ships. We continue
to improve our direct outreach programs by enhancing
loyalty benefits offered to repeat guests. In addition,
Celebrity Cruises provides dedicated agents for guests
with reservations in our premium staterooms, and
introduced a mobile application and mobile website.
This free application allows users to view Celebrity
Cruises’ global destinations, review onboard activities,
e-mail itineraries of interest and request or place a
call or e-mail to customer service directly via the
application.
GUEST SERVICES
We offer to handle virtually all travel aspects related
to guest reservations and transportation, including
arranging guest pre- and post-hotel stay arrange-
ments and air transportation. We offer our guests the
ability to check-in online in order to reduce boarding
time during embarkation. Our air/sea program offers
the Choice Air web-based tool, which provides guests
their choice of flights and the ability to customize
flight arrangements by selecting a specific airline,
flight and class of service. Choice Air can be accessed
and utilized by both travel agents and guests.
Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and
Azamara Club Cruises offer rewards to their guests
through their loyalty programs, Crown & Anchor
Society, Captain’s Club and Le Club Voyage, respec-
tively, to encourage repeat business. Crown & Anchor
Society has over 6.0 million members worldwide.
Captain’s Club and Le Club Voyage have 1.7 million
members combined worldwide. All loyalty programs
recognize loyalty guests by offering exclusive member-
only benefits. Members are typically eligible to enroll
in these complimentary programs after one sailing
and earn membership status by accumulating cruise
points or credits which can be redeemed in future
sailings. In addition, upon achieving a certain level
of cruise points or credits, members benefit from
reciprocal membership benefits across all of our
loyalty programs. We regularly work to enhance each
of our loyalty programs by adding new features and
amenities in order to reward our repeat guests.