Research has shown that the most stressful part of an ocean cruise for most landlubbers isn’t the lifeboat drill or lining up for the midnight buffet: It’s getting to the dock. Delayed flights, missed connections, unfamiliar airports and even long taxi lines can spell disaster for would-be passengers.
Cruise lines have addressed those worries with “home-port cruising,” built on the idea that buyers’ interest is greatest in ocean tours that depart from the port cities closest, easiest to reach, and probably most familiar to them. Most cruise lines now offer departures from a wide selection of locations around the country. Destinations will vary, of course; you’re not going to see Juneau by sailing out of Jersey City. But offering a variety of home port departures has helped cruise lines overcome that basic consumer fear of missing the boat.
Travel service provider Vacation.com thinks it has come up with a way to extend the home port approach to the travel marketing arena. The Alexandria, VA-based firm provides marketing services to 7,000 independent travel agents, using a list of some 5.5 million customer names contributed by about 2,000 of those member mom-and-pop travel shops. It also establishes and maintains relationships with travel suppliers, such as hotel chains, resorts, rental car companies and cruise lines, helping to make sure their products make it out into the marketplace through Vacation.com’s network of local vendors.
That’s where home-port cruising comes in. On Jan. 10, Norwegian Cruise Lines and Vacation.com test-mailed 225,000 full-color self-mailers to addresses contributed by some 800 Vacation.com member agencies. Each brochure was customized with a cover picture of the Norwegian Cruise Lines port nearest to the recipient: Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, New York, and Charleston, SC.
It also carries the familiar name of their local travel agency. That’s important, because member agencies contribute only those names who have bought travel from them in the past. That 5.5 million name list is a database of customers who have shown a propensity to spend on travel—broken out by address,
“We tell our members, ‘Don’t give us names that you’ve collected at the mall,’” says Stephen McGillivray, marketing vice president for Vacation.com. “We want your known customers, not prospects. That way when we market for you and they see your name on the material, that constitutes a call to action. That’s how we get better response, more lift from our direct mail efforts for our members.” Vacation.com’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the mailings—just the local travel agent who supplied the customer name.
Vacation.com deals gets the offers (and usually some portion of the cost of promoting them) from travel suppliers such as Norwegian Cruise Lines, then bumps those offers up against its member-supplied database to find the most likely interested buyers based on past behavior. That list is continually scrubbed for name standardization and data appending—some 25 different fields in all. Vacation.com puts the creative package together, then reaches out to the member agencies to make sure they want that specific offer to be sent to those specific customers.
“We sign a strict confidentiality agreement [with member agencies] that we will never mail to their customers without their permission,” McGillivray says. “So every time we do a sale- and we do about 80 a year, one every seven or eight days—we send the agencies an e-mail, and they have to opt in before we’ll send that Club Med mailer to their customers.” Members get a detailed list of all the names they’ve contributed for whom Vacation.com thinks an offer would be appropriate. They can then apply their detailed knowledge of their local customers to target that list more precisely, for example removing a consumer who has a strong preference for a competing cruise line or had a bad travel experience in Acapulco.
Once the member agencies grant permission, the promotion gets rolling. Agencies get a flash e-mail with a sample of the offer and a notice of when it will show up in their customers’ homes or Internet mailboxes.
These rigorous permission procedures are necessary, McGillivray says, because small travel agencies—like all small businesses-- are naturally very protective of their customer lists. (That anxiety is one reason Vacation.com only gets names from about 28% of its member agencies.) For that reason, Vacation.com adheres to a strict policy of segregating member lists. No member gets access to other members’ names; and duplicate names on two member agencies’ lists are not removed, since a customer may have reasons to shop for travel from both.
In the case of the Norwegian Cruise Lines promotion, the cruise company supplied demographic profiles of the typical NCL vacationer, which Vacation.com used to generate a subset of interested buyers from its members’ lists. Then the service provider added another layer of personalization: where those potential NCL customers lived. That was used to determine the lead product offer in the direct mail brochure. A consumer in New Mexico got a lead offer for a cruise out of Los Angeles; someone in North Carolina got a Charlotte, SC, home port departure.
In the past, Vacation.com mailings for cruises have focused on the cruising destination—sailings to Alaska, to Mexico or to Europe—without regard for the gateway. This campaign was the first time the company has versioned its direct mailing campaign based on the recipient’s location.
“This is not something the member agencies couldn’t do on their own, if they had the time and the resources,” McGillivray says. “It’s not rocket science. But it is an example of the marketing power that small businesses can have when they pool their assets.”
