Catching Up with Norwegian Cruise Line’s David J. Herrera

Not quite at a year and a half into the job, Travel Market Report caught up with Norwegian Cruise Line’s president David J. Herrera to find out how the first 16 months have gone and what travel advisors should be looking forward to.

First up, what’s been the biggest surprises for him since taking over the reins as president?

“I thought I had the sense for everything he [Harry Sommer] had to do,” Herrera said, referring to how closely he and Sommer – now CEO of NCLH – had worked together before the transition. “You’re in the room enough that you feel like you know the job. But the reality is there’s a lot to it.”

In particularly, Herrera said he hadn’t quite understood how important team collaboration was.

“There are so many different facets of team that go into it and everyone is critical… Not one person can run a cruise line. One department can’t run a cruise line. It really does take an entire team.”

Herrera, who previously served as NCL’s chief marketing officer, also said he was surprised by how much can happen on a ship at any given time.

“Life happens on ships,” he said, adding how impressed he constantly is by the nimbleness of the ship operations team. “I’m impressed at how cool and calm and collected they are. Oh, hey, we’re going to be last by six hours, but no big deal. We’ll fix it by doing this and we’ll change that…”

What hasn’t surprised Herrera is how important travel advisors are to NCL.

“I always viewed our TA partners as not only critical to our success, but sincerely part of our organization,” he said.

What has surprised him is the variety of business models.

“The one thing that has been impressed upon me, the more I spend time with them is how diversified the business models are… so many different perspectives and each one seems to work… What works for one group might not work for another.”

Partners first mentality

To help him navigate the unique needs of each agency group that NCL works with, Herrera told TMR he relies heavily on NCL’s senior vice president of North American sales, John Chernesky.

“He understand the business implicitly,” Herrera said, adding it wasn’t just existing relationships he brought to NCL when he joined the company, “he brought over a complete understanding of not only the personalities, but of the opportunities and the challenges.”

Chernesky, Herrera said, has been the driver of many of NCL’s newest trade initiatives including the company’s “easiest cruise to do business with” ethos.

“That is directly from John.”

Herrera remained tight-lipped when it came to talking about what tools and agency initiatives might be forthcoming. He spoke briefly about previously announced tools such as NCL Connect  and the upgraded Quest booking engine.

“The stuff that we’ve been wanting to do for a while, not that we were limited by what we could do, but now we’re kicking on all cylinders,” he said.

More importantly, he added, NCL is trying hard to listen to what advisors want.

“When someone tells us, hey it’s really important for you to generate a partner resource guide, okay, cool. Let’s hurry up and put together a resource guide.”

Private islands and NCL

One of the most talked about topics in the cruise industry among cruise analysts right now is the growth in private islands. TMR asked Herrera about where private islands fit into NCL’s plans, including plans for Great Stirrup Cay and what else might be in the future.

“GSC is one of our highest-rated destinations in the Caribbean,” he said. “And that’s with the level of investment we put in so far today.”

As with questions about new advisor-centric initiatives, Herrera resisted our attempts to find out more for NCL’s GSC plans beyond a new pier. But while he said he has “nothing new to report as far as any other potential investments or any potential islands,” he also said, “There are very few things I would ever rule out, especially if it’s something that our guests are telling us they want.”

Deployment expansion

TMR asked NCL about some of its deployment announcements for the next couple of years, which will see the line putting more capacity back into the Caribbean.

Are NCL cruisers less interested in Europe these days, we asked.

“It’s not that they want Europe less,” he said. “As the smallest fleet in the business of the publicly traded cruise lines, there were a lot of underserved and unserved cruise markets for us.”

As a result, the line prioritized the destinations that clients were demanding, particularly the “high yielding summer markets of Alaska and Europe.”

As the fleet is getting larger, the line is able to fortify some of its positioning, and that includes putting more ships into the Caribbean without taking away from other destinations.

“Now that we’ve reached that focal point where we have this new capacity coming on board, we’re able to deploy it into the Caribbean and Canada. Our guests, they’ve been asking for this. They’ve been asking not only for the Caribbean, but also it’d be great if we had multiple options as far as length, embarkation port, itineraries.”

No worries about anti-cruise sentiment

In the last two minutes we had with Herrera, TMR asked him if he’s worried about some of the growing anti-cruise sentiment in some destinations, along with new cruise limits cropping up around the globe.

Short answer? He’s not worried.

“I am not trying to be Pollyannaish here at all,” he said. “I view these as opportunities for us to continue to not only work together within the NCL organization, but also work with our destination partners, our port agents, and everybody else.”

NCL, he added, is ready to be “a strong partner to our destination ports. We’re willing to comply and support any efforts as requested in the same way that we try to maximize the experience for out guests on our ships.”