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We Want You: Cruise Lines Open for Business to Help Create Great Destinations Carnival
We Want You: Cruise Lines Open for Business to Help Create Great Destinations
By CARLOS TORRES DE NAVARRA, Vice President, Strategic & Commercial Port Development, Carnival Cruise Line, & Chairman, FCCA Operations Committee
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Destinations and stakeholders usually focus on how much they want cruise lines’ business, but we want your business just as much. More importantly, we want you as a partner to fulfill our focus of not only what makes a great destination, but what can sustain our business for years and years.
Sometimes it’s easier for a destination’s public sector to believe they have enough local businesses that can take care of it, or that their tourism sites will be good enough to sustain their cruise tourism business. But it takes a destination as a whole to develop all of the different elements that will lead to mutual successes.
Yes, many passengers visit the Caribbean to enjoy some type of beach or tropical element, but each destination is different. If you look at our ports that we developed as a corporation, we use the natural elements of the destination to create something around it.
For instance, Grand Turk has one of the nicest beaches in the world, so we built the pier right off the beach so passengers have this pristine beach to enjoy themselves—with cabanas and a nice place to eat—as soon as they step off the ship.
At Amber Cove in Puerto Plata, we worked with the existing tourism ele ment and tour providers to create robust offerings for the guests, along with developing a port that highlights the destination and provides an excellent welcoming experience and shopping, dining and leisure activities steps from the gangway.
What makes Cozumel special is not necessarily that it has a beach at the port, but that it has a great shopping and dining experience steps from the port that provide an entryway into Cozumel’s beaches and destination products.
So what makes our ports unique and increases guest satisfaction is using the natural landscape, creating a welcoming entryway with options right off the pier, and providing a very safe and orderly environment where families feel that they can enjoy themselves and not worry about any kind of harassment.
This is not a hard model, but when I look at the landscape of ports and destinations out there, I see a need for this focus. Sure, some destinations can succeed independently of any work.
Many European ports, for example, can simply serve as a portal into histor ical cities.
But in the Caribbean and Mexico, things do not often happen this way. It usually takes a lot of work. Even in destinations where things come easier because of a thriving tourism market, like St. Thomas and St. Maarten, it takes constant effort.
Then there are destinations that need to take a look from top to bottom at what they offer. Are they offering a great experience as soon as passengers step off the ship? Are they offering great shore excursions? What is it that makes them special, and what can they build upon to make them an even better des tination that can sustain success for a long time?
When we, the cruise lines (and not just Carnival), look at these destinations and what they provide for an itinerary, we look at not only what we can sell for shore excursions (which are essential because they are a large part of our business model), but what our passengers can see and do outside of shore excursions.
It’s no secret that everybody who gets off the ship doesn’t buy shore excursions. For example, if half of the guests take a tour, that’s a good success rate for our business model, but what happens with the other 50 percent? Are they having a good time?
We need to know that the destination itself will keep focusing on improving products for passengers not on tours, rath-
er than solely focusing on shore excursions. After all, if 50 percent of guest comments are negative, that’s not sustainable.
At the end of the day, we must adhere to what guests want. If guests don’t buy tickets to go to those places, we don’t have a business. This all begins far before passengers step on the ship or even book their cruise or excursions. Destinations must be desirable and give passengers a reason to want to visit that destination, to sample it on a cruise and then return as a stay-over visitor.
How can we look at every element of what makes a great product and how these cities and countries can fine-tune what they are trying to deliver to guests, in a long-term, sustainable way?
Governments and communities need to get together and not be passive or reactive in their approach, because sometimes it is too late to react after the business is gone, but rather be proactive to ensure that the business stays.
To find ways to change, you should talk to the cruise lines and the FCCA. The FCCA gives a good general direction and specific models, and it offers a great starting point to introduce ideas. But you must also listen to the direct customer. Whether it’s Carnival or Royal Caribbean, you should confidentially request to see what guests are saying about your port and city.
Find out what passengers like and don’t like, what makes your destination special, what can be improved. Hearing this directly from guests will give a sense of how to redirect efforts to ensure success for the future. We get a lot of meetings with destinations, and the ones I enjoy and are productive are the ones that address the challenges and want to find out why guests are unsatisfied.
It could take anywhere from days to years to fix, but it must be done because that makes a significantly larger impact than simply focusing on what guests already like. And this is becoming even more important because business can go away as easily as it came, especially as more and more destinations and companies build ports for our ships and audiences, such as our own Carnival Corporation developments, or Royal Caribbean helping to build Falmouth, Jamaica to handle Oasis-class vessels, Norwegian developing Harvest Caye, Belize and improving Great Stirrup Caye in The Bahamas to align with their product, and MSC developing an eco-island in The Bahamas.
The examples are rare, but there have been destinations that have lost their busi
ness overnight, and I think that nobody should ever feel that their destination will always be in the future.
The moment you take your eye off the business, that’s when trouble starts. You need to be thinking about not only what’s going on currently and what you think about for the future, but also going back to your history and learning from your and other people’s mistakes and successes to decide how to proceed.
And fortunately, sometimes it’s not too late to start. For a long time, Ocho Rios, Jamaica ignored the cruise tourism business and let others take it away, but it recently refocused on what makes Jamaica a great destination and built onto that to lay a foundation for the future.
It did this because of the coordination of both the private and public sectors, through the efforts of entrepreneurs like Chris Blackwell, along with the public sector’s immense support, with Minister Bartlett reinvesting their long-unused tourism enhancement fee, focusing on improving product and eliminating harassment.
Mystic Mountain provides another example, one of a proactive destination
stakeholder. They came to the cruise lines and asked for help to finance the business, presenting their model of giving tours at a certain rate to repay the loans.
If you, the destination or stakeholder, believe something is a good idea, and we, the cruise lines, also believe in it, then it will be a success. That is something sorely missed and needed in all of our destinations, and we need to find people and entities that are willing to work with the cruise lines to develop product.
Like everybody in this world, cruise lines’ most precious commodity is time. We don’t have enough time to manage the hundreds of destinations we go to, but we can provide guests and money.
What do we need from our partners at destinations? We need partners that will develop the product, push for it to be approved and permitted and then run the business and be its local face.
What does everybody get in return? It works as a triangle of success. Cruise lines get a better product for both people taking and not taking tours; the destination gets an improved rating; cruise lines will be happy and continue to bring business; and the local entrepreneurs get a nice return on their investment. Plus, this benefits a destination’s overall stay-over tourism, not only by increasing the likelihood of cruise passengers returning, but also by using this same model to improve the products, experience and marketability.
How do we build this sustainable model? We build it together, laid on a foundation of your ideas on how to develop products and experiences. We are waiting with building blocks in hand, but we need to hear from you.
