Catching Up with Execs from MSC Cruises, Atlas Ocean Voyages, & AmaWaterways

Over the past two months, Travel Market Report has attended a number of industry conferences including the ASTA River Cruise Expo, Seatrade Global Conference, and CLIA’s Crusie360. At each, we had a chance to sit down with executives from a number of cruise lines to talk about a range of topics.

In this two-part piece, we’re rounding up some of what we talked about with each executive.

Atlas Ocean Voyages
TMR sat down with Atlas Ocean Voyages’ president and CEO James Rodriguez, at this year’s Seatrade Global Cruise conference in Miami.

Rodriguez talked about his introduction to expedition cruising and how it opened his eyes to how much more the cruise experience can be.

“I come from a cruise background – 25 years – and I always though an Antarctica expedition was going to be like a regular cruise process. But after my first cruise, I was really inspired by the experience. Not only the landscape, but what it does to the crew and the guest onboard. There’s a bonding that happens that makes it really very inspirational and it’s educational on top of that.”

It was after that cruise that he found himself asking the question, “How do we take that programming and that special piece that makes expedition so exciting, how do we take that into other regions of the world?”

In response, Atlas created two additional types of expedition cruising: epicurean and cultural.

“It means we take the polar expedition team off and we put on a culinary expedition team on that engages with those guests and creates programming,” he explained.

And when the ships aren’t somewhere that a culinary expedition makes sense, the focus turns to cultural expeditions.

“The coastline of South America, the Caribbean. People really want to learn more things about the heritage, the cultures, the people.”

Rodriguez readily admits it’s not an easy concept to understand, especially for any advisor who has never even sold traditional expedition.

“For the traditional travel advisor who’s never sold it before, they wanted to sell us in essence like a cruise experience and I try to explain to them is that it’s a little different because it’s more of an active vacation than a passive vacation,” he said. “This is more about getting your guest to really immerse themselves in these destinations. It’s not necessarily about our onboard experience… We want to get people off to really go and have that experience that the region is known for.”

“Getting them to understand that and to really sell us in the proper way to these guests so the expectations are lining up is a challenge,” he added.

It’s also important that advisors understand some of the key differences between the types of expeditions. For instance, on Antarctic and Polar expeditions all the excursions are included. Not so on epicurean and cultural expeditions (though one so-called Cultural Immersion tour is included on every sailing).

Another advisor-facing focus for Rodriguez is helping advisors identify the right client for Atlas.

“What the travel agent ultimately wants is, do I have this customer in my database,” he said, adding its important to understand that the Atlas client is not only a Baby Boomer demographic.

Instead, Atlas cruisers tend to be younger. More interestingly, he said most come from the South and West of the U.S., though the brand is working on building awareness in the rest of the U.S. and Canada.

MSC Cruises
TMR also sat down with MSC Cruises’ senior vice president of sales and trade engagement, Koreen McNutt, at this year’s Seatrade conference.

TMR asked McNutt specifically about the addition of the Cliffhanger to MSC America, part of a trend for MSC to provide at least one thrill attraction on its new ships.

“You want to have something fun to talk about,” she said. “We’re all trying to be creative on what you can put in your universe, to add that little bit of buzz… Everybody is going to want to take pictures. They’re going to want to get their grandma on it. My kids would want their mom to go on it. It creates fun.”

“And it helps people remember, oh, I did that on MSC,” she added.

As excited as McNutt is about the arrival of MSC America next year, she’s equally excited about MSC Cruises’ entry into the Galveston cruise market, also next year.

“It’s a really big deal,” she said. “We’re super focused on making sure that Galveston gets the attention…We’re very well-known in the northeast, but west people don’t know us.”

To help build demand, MSC Cruises has hired to business development managers for Texas – when McNutt started at MSC in 2022, there wasn’t even one Texas BDM.

“Just like we did in New York with the marketing team – we went in hard with New York – now, we’ll do that in Texas.”

To help area advisors learn more, MSC Cruises will offer webinars, lunch and learns, seminars at sea, and more.

“Those two BDMs are going to be very busy,” she joked.

“One thing we hear a lot from our Texas agents is they’re so excited because they have something new to offer. They want something new to sell,” she added.

TMR asked McNutt what the chances are that MSC will go to Alaska eventually.

“If you could get Seattle to build a new berth, that would be great,” she said. “You don’t want to leave on a Tuesday… People don’t realize, you don’t just go to Alaska. There’s a lot that goes with that. When we can work through all that… We’ve got to go to Texas first”

The new Texas BDMs weren’t McNutt’s only new hires last year.

“We have doubled our sales team. I spent all of 2023 interviewing and hiring. We doubled our BDMs. We more than doubled our strategic and key departments… We know that if we’re going to scale in the United States, it’s about relationships. Cruise is more about relationships than, I think, any other industry and we knew that we had to have boots on the ground and people that were reachable and touchable.”

McNutt has also been focused on improving MSC’s contact center.

“We’re taking them off the phone and retraining for consistency and accuracy, and working hard to make sure we’re staffed so we don’t have hold times… Nobody wants to get on the phone and be on hold for two or three hours. We’re not doing that to them.”

AmaWaterways
TMR sat down with AmaWaterways’ senior vice president of sales Alex Pinelo at this year’s ASTA River Cruise Expo in Amsterdam. Our conversation came just one day after it was announced that Certares was selling its entire stake in the river cruise line to global investment firm L Catterton, so, of course, we asked Pinero about it.

“I think it’s going to benefit the brand. It’s going to benefit our partnerships with the trade,” he said, adding “Rudi and Kristin and the Murphy family are not going anywhere.”

TMR also spoke with Pinelo about the upcoming debut of AmaWaterways cruises on the Magdalena River in Colombia. At the time, the cruise line was still on schedule for a late 2024 launch. (That’s since been pushed back to early 2025.)

Bookings for the Magdalena cruises are robust, Pinelo said, adding that the people booking these cruises are a mix of past AmaWaterways cruisers and new-to-brand.

“Even new to river,” he said. “A lot of them are coming from ocean. But we’re seeing a lot of land folks, too.”

Pinelo also talked about trends he’s been seeing.

“We’re finding that overall our customers are getting younger and more active,” he said.

Along with that, AmaWaterways is seeing more families traveling – a lot of family reunions, multi-generational, and skip generation travel, in particular.

Additionally, the trend of travelers choosing to spend more money – buying from the top down – and staying longer has continued.

Advisors with clients that still want to river cruise this year but haven’t booked yet will find it hard to do so, but Pinelo said AmaWaterways has a few pockets of space open.

“Right now, the best times to look would be July, August, and November on the Danube and Rhine.”