Become a Home Based Travel Agent

Cruisewhiz Craig or Intuition is not exclusively from Women!
By Craig Satterfield

 HAVE YOU EVER read a news story or seen something on television and exclaimed either to everybody in earshot or just in your own mind, “wow, I knew that was going to happen!”  Well that happened to me last year and we are now living to see it actually realized this year.

The term intuition is used to describe “thoughts and preferences that come to mind quickly and without much reflection.”  It doesn’t take much reflection to shoot yourself in the foot.  I think many cruise lines got caught in that trap this summer in Europe!

When most major cruise lines announced last year their exciting plans to basically reposition all of their ships to every port in Europe for the 2011 season, I panicked.  Here we have most major cruise lines, who generally do move some of their ships to Europe and Alaska for the summer, reveling that they will have more ships in Europe this year than ever before. “This is going to be a banner year for Americans cruising in the Baltic, the Med, anywhere across the Atlantic,” they exclaimed! They knew it was going to be hot, they just knew it. I knew otherwise, I just did!

FAST FORWARD TO SPRING AND SUMMER 2011.  What do we know?  There is tension in the Middle East (so what else is new), which is always a concern of American travelers.  You can base that on some of the crazy questions we got from clients regarding issues in Mexico. Add skyrocketing fuel costs making airfares to European cities hard to swallow and now you have trouble making a sale.  I quoted a potential guest a cruise from Venice for $699, coupled with roundtrip airfare from Nashville for $1700. That floored her, and it was a real deal breaker. I tried to get her to see the “big picture“ by not comparing the price differences based upon value, but nothing doing. She started to look for a Caribbean cruise instead.

Due to the unreasonable pricing just to get to the ship, cruise lines are now combining round trip European airfares with a cruise. They are hoping to avoid this same issue I had with the lady from Nashville. This is something we have not seen in many years.  A sure sign of too much tonnage combined with not enough cheap airfares abroad. More amazing is that I see these same ships are scheduled to do the same for 2012 as well.

TO MAKE THINGS EVEN TOUGHER, let’s take a look at Caribbean cruises.  Potential cruisers to the Caribbean Islands this year don’t believe you when you advise them that only two cruise lines are sailing from Florida ports this summer.   Last summer, the Celebrity Solstice and Emerald Princess joined Carnival and Royal Caribbean in classic 7 night cruises to the Eastern and Western Caribbean…not this year.  If you are not a fan of Carnival or chose not to vacation with 5,000 others on Royal Caribbean’s gigantic mega ships, then you are basically out of luck.

I recently asked an executive of one of the cruise lines that abandoned South Florida this year why his line did not stick around so cruisers would have a wider selection of ships and lines. He replied that those Caribbean cruises last year just did not meet the pricing levels that they expected to earn in Europe.  Surprise, surprise, they are basically ending up the same aren’t they. I guess cruise lines can try and make it up with profits on shore excursions, which I would expect would be much more profitable in Europe.

I ASK MYSELF HOW I CAN YOU USE MY OWN INTUITION FOR A PATHWAY TO SUCCESS?  Your personal feelings and inner thoughts about your business can help you under the right conditions.  So what are these conditions?  For starters, pay attention to your inner conversations.  I talk to myself all the time, inwardly most of the time.  I do my best inner conversing when I am floating in the ocean.  All I can see when I do that is the blue sky and my feet!  When you repeat these words to yourself several times, it sends a message to your inner self that it is truth.  Words are very powerful, even if you are only talking to yourself.  Experts tell us that we are most apt to use our intuition for common issues and not business practices. What a waste of power!  I am trying to harness this power myself to come up with new ideas for marketing myself.  But you now have a good excuse to spend time at the beach.

USE YOUR INTUITION, just be yourself, use it to formulate where you want to be in business and what you need to get there…much better than those thoughts that come to mind without much reflection which I mentioned earlier.  What do you think is going to come of so many cruise lines moving ships to Australia?  Any inner thoughts about that?

ANOTHER POWERFUL TOOL IS YOUR INTEREST, YOUR PASSION.  A good example was a business that was very big 30 years or so ago…baseball card stores.  Some of you must remember those. They popped up all over the place. This was a retail outlet for baseball card collectors and fans.  The popularity of these stores driven by baseball card collectors drove prices up. This interested a lot of entrepreneurs out there. There were two types of business people that owned and operated them.  The successful ones did it for the love, the passion of what they were doing, almost as if they would do it for free.  The others were money-only driven.  It is easy to know which ones stayed in business the longest.  Use you passion and intuition to your advantage too.  It might take courage in the beginning but practice makes perfect.

When you are right about your intuition, give yourself permission to sing the song from the TV show, Will and Grace: “Told you so, told you so, told you, told you, told you so.”