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How to Start Your Home-Based
Selling cruises is a wonderful way to make a living and more now than ever, cruise entrepreneurs are going home-based. While working from home has many advantages over opening a storefront operation, there are many measures to consider before you open your doors. Here is a step-by-step guide to opening your new home-based cruise business. Develop a Business Concept: It is not enough to decide that you will become a cruise agent and simply open up for business. You need to evolve a business concept that makes sense and will become a viable entity. You should add unique value in addition to simply making a cruise reservation on behalf of your clients. Are you going to specialize in a certain type of cruise product or become expert in a certain aspect of cruising? Is your niche going to be serving a geographical area with in-home presentations for clients considering a cruise? How about specializing in honeymoon cruises, family reunions, incentive cruises, world cruises or special niches and lifestyles? You should be able to define your business concept in a way that makes sense to potential new clients and one that clearly adds value to both the client and the product. Develop Your Business and Marketing Plan: Once you have developed your business concept, it is time to create a business plan for your venture and also develop a subsequent marketing plan. You should be able to state your specific expectations in terms of income and revenue and be able to estimate how many cruise bookings you will need to accomplish during a specific period of time to meet your objectives. It doesn’t matter if you are part-time or full-time, but you should be able to recognize your specific objectives. Your marketing plan will follow and is a roadmap of exactly how you will generate the bookings. Your Business and Marketing plans need not be so elaborate that you cannot change them in a heartbeat and their existence is simply as tools to measure your expectations against your results.
Setting Up Your Cruise Business: Now comes the fun part. Once you have completed the planning part of your business, it is time to start it. Here is what you will need to do. Think of a business name and then file a Fictitious Business Name Statement at the appropriate office within your state. You will be able to make sure that the name is available for use when you register it. Once you have filed your business name, you will need to visit your local city hall and obtain a business license. Then you will need to open a business checking account. Some states require that you also open a second trust account to hold your client’s funds in. Many states (California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada, Rhode Island and Washington) have “Seller of Travel” registration laws that you must comply with. While each state is different, you will need to conform before actually accepting reservations. Once this is done, you are ready to evolve your business identity. I strongly urge you to engage a professional graphic designer to create your logo and stationery. Many times this identity will be the only thing a client sees when dealing with you. If you are going to use the web as a primary marketing tool, having your website designed to match your agency identity would be appropriate at this stage. Setting Up Your Home Office: Now that you are organized and ready to open your business, it is time to furnish and equip your home office. Be sure to isolate dedicated space for your office. Even if it is just going to be a corner in your bedroom, you should furnish the space to be a professional and dedicated office environment. One of the largest challenges of working from home is keeping your workspace separate from your home space. Having work related files all over the house will simply not be successful. They should be neatly organized in your office space. Purchase the best desk and most comfortable chair possible, as this will impact your ability to work. Buy quality file and storage cabinets with ample space to handle the brochures and files that your business will require. When it comes time to purchase your computer, consider buying a high quality notebook computer with a docking station so that you can use a large monitor and an ergonomic keyboard when you are home, but still have all your files with you when you visit clients in their homes. You will need the fastest Internet access that you can purchase for your computer and make sure that the software you are using is standard in the cruise industry. You should have a word processor like Microsoft Word, spreadsheet program like Access, A client Contact Management program like ACT, a publishing program like Microsoft Publisher and an HTML editor like Microsoft’s Expression Web. I would also opt for a copy of Adobe’s Acrobat so that you can create .pdf files for distribution to your clients over the Internet. Let’s say you have a group, or a large family going on a cruise. You can easily compile all of the information that you would like them to have and create a .pdf file that is put on your website. Each participant can then download and print the file resulting in more efficiency and less cost. Now that you are officially in business, it is time to start your quest for additional education and information to enable you to become even more valuable to your clients. You should subscribe to all of the cruise industry trade publications (you can find a complete list with links at www.TravelAgentResourceCenter.com) Start attending the cruise industry trade shows (CLIA’s Cruise360 and Travel Trade’s Cruise-a-thons) and you may want to join the cruise associations (CLIA and NACTA) One of the most valuable things that you will evolve is your personal reference material. By attending the cruise trade shows you can obtain many of the cruise line’s agent materials, but it is your browser’s bookmarks that is going to really enable you to sell like a pro. Let’s say that you have a client that is trying to decide between two ships, by book marking reviews of each ship, you can help the client make a decision. By having well-organized bookmarks for ships, reviews, port information and such, you can literally walk a client through their cruise and answer every question that they can think of in just a few clicks. You best bet to gain knowledge is by completing the online training that is available by the cruise lines. Princess Cruise’s Princess Academy is an excellent way to become a Princess Cruises Specialist. Training like that available at the Princess Academy is invaluable to agents that want to sell cruises. It goes well beyond simply teaching about the Princess brand and helps agents gain a larger picture of the cruise industry and the many opportunities it affords. Further, from my perspective, there is no better way to learn about how to sell cruises than to get on the ships and do the itineraries. The cruise industry cruise seminars and familiarization opportunities should take a high priority (especially among newer agents) By sailing on a ship and itinerary, you understand the subtle nature of the ports and the cruise product itself. Now that your business is a reality, I hope to see you on a cruise seminar at some point in the future. Best of luck!
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