Arnie Weissmann:
The Costa disaster reveals the
conflict between our emotional
and rational selves. 12
Easing U.S. visa poli-
cies, Obama declares:
‘America is open for
business.’ 6
Richard Turen:
The Concordia incident raises
questions that will haunt our
industry a long time. 36
www.travelweekly.com
THE NATIONAL NEWSPAPER OF THE TRAVEL INDUSTRY
JANUARY 23, 2012
[ NO IMMEDIATE IMPACT ON SALES ]
Anxious agents
assess damage
from Concordia
Word
wars
By Donna Tunney
T W ILLUS TRATION B Y ROMINA PALUDI
As brochures from Globus and
Trafalgar made their way to retail-
ers this year, agents quickly noted
conflicting approaches to marketing
traditional guided-travel products.
BY MICHELLE BARAN PAGE 16
[ FEES WILL BE APPLIED ON A CONTRACT-BY-CONTRACT BASIS ]
Travelport: Charging for Agility is the model of the future
After the initial shock from the
wreck of the Costa Concordia began to subside, many agents came
to an uneasy conclusion: Repeat
cruise clients would mostly be un-fazed by the event, but a potentially
large number of first-time cruisers
are now more likely to turn away
from a vacation-at-sea option.
If that prediction proves to be true, it
would represent a significant setback for the
cruise lines as well as frontline sellers, both of
which have been investing heavily in marketing to first-time cruisers.
“I feel there’s a lot of damage, at least
short-term, to the first-time cruiser market,”
said Helen Coiro, owner of New York-based
• CLIA, Congress and industry veterans
discuss future of cruise safety. P. 38
• A Travel Weekly survey of agents about
the sales impact of the shipwreck. P. 37
By Johanna Jainchill
ATLANTA — While admitting mistakes in
the way it rolled out its Agility suite, Travelport said last week that the program is here
to stay and that the principles behind it will
enable both travel agents and GDSs to move
into the future.
Travelport executives also said that an
ASTA statement earlier this month and
trade publication reports, including a Page
1 report in Travel Weekly’s Jan. 9 issue, had
mischaracterized a change in the timing of
charges for Agility as applying to all Travelport customers, when in fact the changes
were being applied on a case-by-case basis.
Agility became something of a dirty word
among North American travel agents who
subscribe to Travelport’s GDSs — Apollo,
Galileo and Worldspan — after they learned
last month that they would be paying a
monthly fee for the Agility bundle of pro-
grams, several of which were previously free
and some of which are new.
Direct Line Cruises. “Frankly, after this, if
I hadn’t cruised numerous times, it might
scare the pants off of me. But I don’t think
that’s the case with the savvy cruiser.”
Others agreed, and many speculated that
the grim and disturbing images, coupled
with the rising death toll in the days since
the Concordia collided with a rocky reef off
the Italian island of Giglio on Jan. 13, would
send potential first-timers scrambling to
book a land vacation instead.
Steve Gelfuso, president and CEO of
Cranston, R.I.-based Cruise Brothers, which
has 1,500 affiliated home-based agents, said
he believed that anyone who has been “
sitting on the fence” and thinking about taking
a first cruise has been turned off by the idea.
