Posts Tagged ‘Dubai’

Guest Post: Celebrating Royal Caribbean’s Travel Agent Appreciation Month

From Vicki Freed

I just returned from a wonderful vacation in Dubai onboard Brilliance of the Seas. Describing the adventure my family and I had in the crossroads of futuristic advances and historical tradition truly deserves its own entry, so I’m hoping Adam will invite me back to share the incredible details of my voyage in another guest blog. Dubai truly is a destination for the well-traveled explorer who wants to embark on a one-of-a-kind journey to a culturally fascinating international destination.

But enough about that. This is absolutely my favorite month here at the office. Why? Because we’re celebrating our 5th annual Travel Agent Appreciation Month! Throughout April, we at Royal Caribbean take time to recognize and thank one of the most important secrets to our success – travel agents.

Having been in the travel industry for the past 30 years (ouch! Am I really that old?), I have seen the value of travel agents grow substantially. At the age of 21 I realized how important they were then, but they’re even more important now. Travelers today have more access to information via the internet, making the travel agent role even more critical. As my teenage son would say, it’s a classic case of “TMI” (too much information). This influx causes an overload and leads to consumer confusion.

Travel agents, therefore, are value interpreters. Finding the right “fit” for the consumer is their specialty, taking the time to get to know their customers personally and creating vacation packages tailored to the interests, needs and budgets of their guests. Travel agents deliver memories to last a lifetime to many people, every day. For them it’s all in a day’s work, in my opinion that’s what defines a hero.

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BY:Adam|2nd April, 2010 5 Comments

Guest Post – Dubai is Brilliant on Brilliance

Lisa Bauer - Senior VP, Hotel Operations

Lisa Bauer - Senior VP, Hotel Operations


Greetings from 35,000 feet. We are just on our way back from an amazing visit to Brilliance of the Seas in Dubai. The three of us John Mc Girl, VP Human Resources and Captain Bill Wright, Sr. VP Marine Operations (also known as Captain Storm by me from his time on Oasis) continue our travels to all 21 of our ships.

This weeks Anchored in Excellence Program (AIE) was to Dubai to visit the leadership team and crew onboard Brilliance of the Seas. Brilliance began her 7 night itineraries three weeks ago, and we wanted to see how this new itinerary for our brand was being operated and received by our guests.

We held an all crew meeting, and then any crew member that wanted to meet with us 1:1 came by to visit to share their feedback, suggestions or concerns. The biggest number of crew feedback is really around our career “pipeline.” We had a number of defined positions with specific career tracks. Our crew is always anxious to get promoted, so they do the interviews and qualifications for the new position they want, and then they go into the pipeline for when a position becomes available. They usually come to see us too because they want us to know that they are anxious to grow with the company and want to know “how much longer?”

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BY:Adam|1st March, 2010 13 Comments

Royal Caribbean’s Fleetwide Holiday Season and Global “Winter” Programs

I hope everyone is having an enjoyable holiday season.

The microscope may not recede from Oasis of the Seas for a long time. But that reality doesn’t obscure that we have reached the holiday season for the whole fleet and our full global portfolio of “winter” programs. The word winter of course reflects a northern bias. We have Splendour of the Seas and Vision of the Seas in Brazil and Rhapsody of the Seas in Australia because it is very much summer in those regions. Plus Legend of the Seas is in sunny Singapore and Brilliance of the Seas is a few weeks away from its first voyage from Dubai. Still in the Caribbean, but very much part of our global expansion strategy, Enchantment of the Seas has begun our Panama/Colombia program.

The preparation for these programs is a year-round phenomenon. We are either delivering these programs or we are processing the lessons learned and developing the next season’s program. As we have grown our international offices’ capabilities, we look increasingly to our distant colleagues for feedback on product content, distribution and pricing. We’re very happy to have Americans and all nationalities cruise on these products, but I will note that the ships in Brazil have mostly Brazilians onboard, the ship in Australia has mostly Australians onboard and so forth. That’s no different than if you take a land vacation to such countries, but some of our guests are surprised to find this to be the case. In the 1990’s our worldwide cruises were primarily to take Americans on exotic itineraries. Now our worldwide cruises are for all nationalities with the usual case being that the nationalities nearest to the homeport are the largest % of the guest mix.

Switching subjects, I am coming up to my last race in the 45 – 49 age category shortly to be followed by my first race in the 50 – 54 age category. I am running well and hungry for best times and medals. There will still be faster runners in Miami in my age group, but only a handful. I will have multiple chances during the first quarter to run a 5k under 19 minutes. That’s the primary target. Meanwhile, my team at work collectively bought me a new table tennis table which is really nice of them. Thanks! They may really want to facilitate my table tennis abilities or they may want me to play more table tennis and leave them alone.

BY:Adam|26th December, 2009 8 Comments

An Impressive First Taste of Dubai

After threatening to go to Dubai for a number of years, I finally went for my first ever visit. I was favorably impressed, notwithstanding Dubai is obviously suffering from a recession which is slowing its monumentally ambitious plans for the future.

My reasons for going were to generate media coverage in the region for next year’s Brilliance of the Seas program, to meet tourism officials from the ports of call Brilliance will visit when she arrives in January and to interact with European travel agents we had brought to Dubai for a familiarization. Arabian Travel Market was taking place in Dubai at the same time so all of the nearby destinations were present. And when I say present, what I mean is that I have never in my career seen such elaborate trade show stands. I think some of the hotel companies could have saved money by dragging a whole hotel on to the trade show floor rather than use the booth displays I visited.

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BY:Adam|26th May, 2009 10 Comments
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Growing a Cruise Brand Globally

The development of our global interests, even in difficult economic times, is key to our future. As a result, my most significant travel is to countries where cruise markets and/or ship deployments are very promising but in a less developed state. Often that means China, Singapore, Australia, Brazil or even Dubai where I visited last week and am pictured here with a representative from Abu Dhabi. I like to say that our guests and crew come from everywhere and our ships go everywhere. This is more obvious with each passing year. Royal Caribbean International is already a truly global brand with even more global opportunity ahead whenever the worldwide recession abates.

Adam in Abu Dabi

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BY:Adam|20th May, 2009 14 Comments