Why Use a Travel Advisor Relationships with suppliers – you know when you’re visiting your neighborhood restaurant where the servers are familiar and give you a new dessert to try with your meal sometimes? Companies and people love to reward loyalty and the same is true about travel providers. Travel advisors have relationships with these companies and their staff and want to keep that relationship mutually beneficial! The suppliers know that if they can keep their travel advisors’ clients happy, they’ll be more likely to send more people their way. Sometimes this can translate into extra attention, free upgrades, or even things like chocolate-covered strawberries in your room! Knowledge about products – what’s the best travel insurance and should you get it? If something were to go wrong or there were any last-minute changes, which suppliers ha...
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Showing posts from November, 2024
Making Friends on a Cruise
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By
Garry
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Cruising with friends is always fun, but a cruise is also an opportunity to meet new friends. On a ship with hundreds or thousands of passengers, how do you find those you’d like to spend time with? Connect with your fellow passengers before the cruise begins. Groups for passengers of specific cruises can pop up on social media well before the departure date. Future shipmates use these groups to share tips and recommendations and make plans to meet on board. Ask your professional travel advisor where to look for social media groups for your upcoming cruise. Get involved in onboard activities. Be sure to choose a cruise that offers activities you enjoy, whether that’s sunning by the pool, working out, going on shore excursions, playing deck games, listening to guest speakers, or taking in a live performance. The activities will get you out of your cabin and into the mix with people who enjoy the same things you do. Sit with others at dinner. In the ship’s dining room, ask the m...
A Fleet of New Ships
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By
Garry
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Cruise fans have a lot to look forward to because a new crop of cruise ships is preparing to debut in 2025. New ships can be many years in the making; they are marvels of modern engineering. Planning and design often take several years, and the actual construction of a ship – from laying the keel to the first float out – can take 18 months or more. For example, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas , first announced in 2016, just entered service in January 2024. Here are some of the ships scheduled to make their first voyages in 2025: MSC Cruises is planning an April launch for World America , which will be dedicated to the North American market. The ship will have lots of bars, lounges, and dining spots, a 350-foot-long promenade, fabulous waterparks, an 11-story drop slide, and an over-water swing ride. With a passenger capacity of 6,762, World America will sail the Caribbean from Miami. Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Aqua is also set to launch in April. It will have the li...
Millennials Take to the Seas
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By
Garry
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Those who think cruising is only for travelers in their golden years haven’t seen this survey statistic from CLIA, the Cruise Lines International Association: the average age of cruise passengers is 46, and more than a third are under age 40. This means that millennials – loosely defined as people born between 1981 and 1996, who are now aged 28 to 43 – are likely to find quite a few of their peers on a cruise ship. Millennials now make up about 22% of cruise passengers and 88% of those who have cruised plan to do so again. Millennial interest in cruising may originate in cruise trends like more relaxed onboard dress codes, more adventurous cuisine, more modern ship décor, and more accommodations that suit solo cruisers (a growing number of passengers, currently almost 10%, sail on their own). Like passengers of all ages, millennials are drawn to things that cruises excel at, like visiting multiple destinations and providing vacation value. If you’re a millennial new to cruising –...