Hawke, who is also the chief executive of Cosmos, used his opening address at the Clia River Conference in Amsterdam on the weekend to make the plea, telling delegates: “Cruise lines invest huge amounts of money and training in travel agents.
“I want to make a plea that when you go back to your shops you only support Clia member cruise lines. We invest a lot of support in you, it would be nice to see that support reciprocated.”
Speaking later to TTG, Hawke added: “All the cruise lines who belong to Clia spend a lot of money and do a huge amount to support agents. Once a customer decides to try a cruise, then we are fierce competitors. But in getting them there we all work together.
“There are some cruise lines though who are not members of Clia – that’s their choice but at Clia we are working together to support agents – I would say to agents to please show us the same love back,” he said.
“In the UK we have such a successful breadth of product that agents don’t need to sell non-Clia member products. Everything we do is about ‘contacting your travel agent’. We are very supportive of the trade”.
Elsewhere Hawke was not shy in praising competitor line Uniworld for the launch of its new youth brand U by Uniworld. “It’s really exciting,” he said. “I really think it will help attract new people into cruise and I applaud what they’ve done there”.
Meanwhile he highlighted figures that showed more agents than ever are selling river cruise, particularly with face-to-face and phone bookings – “the opportunity is massive”, he insisted.
However Hawke said online agent sales for the sector were “slightly down”. “But I think that’s a good thing,” he added, highlighting that it showed customers “still value that in-depth conversation with an agent”.
