Catching Up with Regent Seven Seas’ Steve Odell and Shawn Tubman

Regent Seven Seas Cruises has a lot going on this year and much of it revolves around strengthening its already-strong relationship with the travel agency community.

Travel Market Report recently caught up with Steve Odell, RSSC’s chief sales officer and Shawn Tubman, senior vice president of sales, to learn hear more about where Regent Seven Seas’ priorities are this year and looking into the future.

A “whole” partnership
“We’re making partnership whole,” said Odell, who re-joined the Regent Seven Seas team in mid-January. Odell, who has worked in the cruise business for more than 30 years, including 17 years at Silversea Cruises, has a nearly 10 year history working for Norwegian Cruise line Holdings and its three brands.

“We’re providing real tools to get things done and trying to be a step ahead of everyone else in how we work with our agents,” he added.

The line started in this direction late last year with a program called Regent Elevate, which Tubman referred to as a “trade support umbrella program.”

“Our main objective is to be the supplier of choice when it comes helping our partners grow their business and grow their profitability,” he said. “We want to invest as much as we can in improving their success, whether it’s prospecting or marketing or converting and selling. Regent Elevate brings all these elements together.”

 The program, he explained, has three main pillars: insights, messaging, and tools.

“We want share with our trade partners all the psychographics, behavioral, media consumption, and buying habits of our prospects and our past guests,” Tubman said.

On top of those insights, RSSC is sharing what messaging resonates with the Regent guest.

“What works for us, will work for our partners… we’re sharing tips from all our marketing channels, whether its email, direct mail, paid, social, organic, and so forth.”

Regent Connect
Falling under the Regent Elevate umbrella is the line’s new Regent Connect tool, a personalized one-on-one marketing tool that advisors can use to send to a prospect.

With Recent Connect, advisors send a link to a microsite to their prospects. The microsite has the advisor’s branding, their name, their photo, email, contact information and logo. The site also has Regent content to help position and justify who Regent is and why people should be interested.

“When they click for more information or are interested in booking, an email will go from that prospect to the advisor,” Tubman explained.

Another tool Regent is offering advisors is a lead nurturing email series, comprising five emails that take prospects down the funnel from learning about the product to making a decision.

“All they have to do is click, put in their call to action, and we give them the cadence of send this email today, send this email 10 days from now, etc.,” Tubman told TMR.

Revamped university and incentives
Concurrently with the launch of Regent Elevate, the cruise line also revamped its RSSC University with all new courses and degrees.

“We have graduate degrees now, and I’m sure we’ll have a PhD level at some point,” Tubman said.

In addition to helping advisors learn and market, Regent Seven Seas wants to help them grow their businesses by offering incentives for selling Regent.

For instance, advisors who make their first Regent booking after completing RSSC University get up to a $400 bonus commission.

Regent is also famous for its gift card incentives, Tubman added.

“People furnish their whole house with our gift cards,” he joked.

Overall, Tubman said, the response from the agency community has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s been especially great for advisors who have never sold Regent before, he added.

“Once they get over that obstacle of being a little intimidated by the luxury market, once they get that first booking, their confidence skyrockets and they see it’s not that complicated.”

Focus on new to cruise
A primary focus for Regent this year – and in the future – is attracting new-to-cruise guests to the brand.

“The drive is to find new business, to find first time guests, and the partnership with our travel agents is the absolute key to that,” said Odell, adding “we are very focused on not just being in the bubble of cruise.”

A lot of Regent’s educational programming is designed around “thinking more broadly and laterally in your customer base or in the population at large,” he said. “People who stay in luxury hotels, go on safaris, go to expensive villas, or charter yachts.”

The Regent value proposition is especially intriguing to these guests, Odell said, because of how expensive land vacations have gotten. In fact, he added, for the first time that he can remember, Regent is receiving demand from FIT travelers who never would have considered cruising in the past.

To help advisors, Regent has put together hotel comparison examples in its educational materials that advisors can share with these clients to highlight the value proposition. There’s also a 40-minute webinar for advisors to “show them what the situation is, what the opportunity is, how to overcome those objections, how to close the sale, and what’s in it for the partner,” Tubman added.

“We still draw mostly from first timers from the premium cruise line suites or the contemporary suites, but this is another avenue,” Odell said, explaining that it’s this drive for the new-to-cruise market that inspired Regent to test out a new series of immersive sailings designed to replicate the style of experience land travelers are used to.

“Instead of a 10-night cruise with eight ports, it’ll be four ports, but each port will be an overnight or maybe two nights, giving those guests the opportunity to immerse themselves in that destination,” Tubman said.

“We think it could be a game changer in the industry, so we need our travel partners to support us on this,” added Odell.

Odell also pointed to some of the new entrants into cruise – particularly the hotel brands – as great for luxury cruise sellers.

“The good thing about the hotel companies getting into the market is that they’re bringing a lot of new to cruise… if you look at Bonvoy for Ritz, that’s 177 million people, many of which will be hearing about the cruise proposition for the first time.”

Strong wave
With all that’s going on with Regent, it’s no surprise that business is booming.

“Wave is definitely stronger than we hoped for,” Tubman said. “It’s exceeding our expectations. Our week last week [last of January] was the strongest week we’ve had since a year ago wave… We’re very bullish for ’24 and we are really going to turn the corner to focus more on ’25 shortly.”

Odell added, “It’s a true bounce back.”

Among the trends, Tubman said he’s noticed, are a longer booking window and the growing popularity of longer cruises.

“Our 60 to 90 day Grand Voyages are very popular,” he said.

Speaking about bookings, Odell emphasized how important it is for advisors to ramp up their marketing and outreach whenever a cruise line does a product or season launch.

“We obviously are spending a lot ourselves in the marketplace, sending out a lot of information. It’s a good time to jump onboard,” he said. “Yes, we have to focus on ’24 and ’25, but getting a good book of business that is further out is key, because there’s demand.”

He also advised marketing around limited-time and seasonal promotions. For instance, from Feb. 16 to 29, 2024, Regent is offering savings of up to 25% on cruise fares on 23 voyages ranging, which can be combined with the line’s Upgrade Your Horizon Wave Season offer.

In summary, Odell said he believes the potential for advisors is enormous.

“Luxury is definitely on the rise everywhere… we think we are very well placed to grow in this sector and be the leader.”