After Backlash, Norwegian Fixes Facebook Pages

Norwegian Cruise Line said the Facebook business pages of its “personal cruise consultants” have been revised so the sales reps are no longer listed as travel agents or travel agencies.

Norwegian took corrective action after word spread through the travel agent community that the cruise line’s customer service representatives had posted individual Facebook business pages. The pages feature Norwegian-branded images and calls for consumers to book directly with the line’s cruise consultants.

Travel Market Report found last week that nearly a dozen of the Facebook business pages identified Norwegian reps as a “travel agent” or “travel agency” and brought the matter to the line’s attention. (http://www.travelmarketreport.com/articles/Norwegian-Reps-on-Facebook-Rankle-Agents)

“All personal cruise consultant pages have been changed,” a Norwegian spokeswoman told Travel Market Report this week. But at presstime a Google search turned up two reps whose Facebook business pages still contained the misinformation.

Not intentional
Camille Olivere, Norwegian’s senior vice president of sales, said last week that the issue was due to Facebook automatically categorizing the line’s cruise consultants’ pages into travel categories. It was not an active move by Norwegian employees to pose as agents, she said.

Olivere assured agents that the Norwegian representatives are not poaching online leads from agents. “We’ve used Facebook as an engagement tool. It’s not a selling tool,” she asserted.

Stealing clients?
Agents said they appreciated Norwegian changing its Facebook presence, but that the changes do not mask an obvious trend of cruise companies looking to go direct – and not being honest about it.

“All cruise lines claim to support travel agents and some are sincere,” said Alan Rosenbaum, who has owned a CruiseOne franchise in Georgia for 10 years. “But in too many cases cruise line reservations agents are trying to steal our clients, in spite of what the execs say.

“Cruise line executives are paying lip service to the policy [of not poaching agency clients], believing that travel agents are too naive to realize what’s really going on.”

Industry-wide issue
Norwegian, however, shouldn’t be put on the spot and singled out over the Facebook fiasco, Rosenbaum said.

“It’s really not important to single out Norwegian,” said Rosenbaum. “It’s an industry-wide issue.”

In a Travel Market Report poll this week, nearly 90% of respondents said they were worried that more mainstream cruise lines were looking to aggressively grow their direct business.