MSC’s Marianne Sequeira Tackles Training, Home-Based Agents, and Travel Consortia in Her First Week on the Job

Just a week into her new job at MSC Cruises, national accounts manager Marianne Sequeira is meeting with her team and studying up on the new products she soon will be helping MSC’s travel-agency partners sell.  

To help in her mission, MSC will be rolling out a series of interactive training programs for its travel-consortia, franchise, and host-agency partners. They are designed to be “very interactive and very educational, to take travel agents step-by-step through the new products coming online, including the MSC Divina and the new private island,” both scheduled to debut in 2017. 

But all that’s still two or three months down the road. In the meantime, Sequeira is building relationships with the travel-agency consortia and the local home-based agents in the Ft. Lauderdale area where she is based. She’s been meeting one-on-one with MSC’s accounts, introducing herself to the ones she doesn’t know and reconnecting with the ones she has worked with before.  

 “There’s so much growth potential out there, and working with consortia partners will be a win for both sides,” she told TMR.  “We look forward to building our partnership with them as well as with local home-based agents. Those are the people we lean on. They are our advocates, and they will be out there pushing for and supporting us.” 

Working with groups is nothing new to Sequeira; they’re much the same people she has been working closely with at the Hertz Corp. for the past three years, and before that at Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines. 

“It’s a very interesting time to be with MSC, it’s such a growth story,” she said. Her goal is to be completely up to speed by 2017, when MSC’s new Seaside will join the Divina, which debuted in December; its private island in the Caribbean will open to the public; and its new focus on wellness will bring a new way of looking at vacation travel.

At that point, “we’ll be offering some initiatives to visit and explore the island, and to strengthen our relationships with the local agents,” she said. “We’re going to roll out a lot of educational programs in the marketplace. It’s a matter of helping travel agents better understand who we are, with so much new information.”