Avid Cruiser Insider

Larry Pimentel, president and CEO of SeaDream Yacht Club, discusses potential expansion for the company (nothing firm yet though) and opportunities for agents to sell ship charters.

The view from Diane Moore’s Fourth Avenue, 11th-floor office may not be as picturesque as the view from her old office, which overlooked Puget Sound from Holland America Line’s headquarters. But the future has never looked brighter from the perspective of the sales and marketing executive who remained “on board” when Ambassadors Cruise Group acquired Windstar in April.

Sitting behind congratulatory vases of tuilps and roses, Moore, who joined the new Seattle-based cruise company earlier this month, apologizes for the clutter in her new office. But while the move left Moore organizationally flustered, her focus is anything but, particularly with regard to the company’s desired relationship with travel agents.

Though some of Majestic America Line’s marketing efforts have been direct to the consumer, Moore emphasizes that she was brought on board to bolster relationships with agents. “Our focus moving forward is to work with travel agents,” says Moore, senior vp sales and marketing for both Windstar Cruises and Majestic America Line. “With two products like these that are so unique, we have to rely on our travel agent partners.”

Moore brought nine people with her from Windstar, including two who worked inside sales with travel agents. Moreover, she said the two brands will begin rolling out a series of travel agent training seminars in the fall. Plans are to take the seminars on the road to key cities nationwide.

Also in the works are a new res system (the brands currently use Delta Queen’s antiquated system) and co-op budgets. “We’d rather spend our money with travel agencies that have relationships with clients,” Moore says. “We’re also looking at our national accounts agreements. We’re definitely looking to strengthen those.” (Moore notes that both brands, Majestic America and Windstar, are Virtuoso preferreds.)

Moore is responsible for marketing 2,200 beds now, as opposed to only 600 when she headed up Windstar only. There’s more on the way too. The company is positioning itself for long-term, sustained growth - and for further acquisitions. “Windstar is not the last acquisition,” Moore says. “I can assure you of that. Our vision is to become the leader in small ship cruising worldwide. Windstar was the first foray into the international market but certainly not the last. ”

Fleet Upgrades
Windstar’s Degrees of Difference initiative that began under Holland America Line will continue. Wind Surf completed the upgrades in January (listen to the audio interview by clicking the player below), and Wind Spirit emerged from drydock in April with all enhancements in place. Wind Star will complete upgrades in October.

The Veranda dining area was freshened up with “teaklike” furniture, Moore says (SOLAS regulations do not allow real teak furniture). The biggest change was in the lounge, where the bar was moved to a better location aft and the spa, which had been off the stairwell, was moved to a dedicated space and enlarged.

“It created more of an actual spa feeling with two massage rooms, a reception area and a large salon,” Moore says. The lobby area was refreshed with new ceilings and some soft goods. Public bathrooms were updated, and staterooms received identical treatment as on Wind Surf, with remodeled bathrooms being the biggest improvement.

One change, however, had to be reverted. Wind Surf was reflagged under European Union registry, which would have allowed it to sail an Athens-Athens itinerary. But with the change of Windstar’s ownership, Wind Surf reverted to Bahamian registry, and the Athens itinerary now turns in Istanbul.

On perennial question has been whether per diems will increase? Not any more than in past years, Moore says. There was a double-digit increase in 2006 and a slight increase budgeted for 2007. “Our plan is not to substantially increase the rates,” Moore says. “The 2008 budget was what we established at Holland America, so while I don’t see that going up hugely, our business base is good for ‘08. We’re ahead of where we were last year.”

Moore says that “C&I” (Charters & Incentives) business is strong, and that two sailings in 2007 were chartered by families, a segment that Moore feels is a good opportunity for travel agents. “One family chartered the whole Wind Spirit,” she says.

Paddle Wheelers Get Upgrades Too
While Windstar’s ships all will have been “contemporized” by fall, Delta Queen’s classic liners present more of a challenge. The company decided to wait until March of next year to reintroduce the Mississippi Queen. “We decided that we wanted to bring that ship to a different level,” Moore says. “We’re doing a total renovation and may use some of the Windstar designers.”

The goal is to do something similar to what Windstar did with Degrees of Difference. Soft goods will be upgraded, flat-panel televisions will be installed. Food service will be upgraded. Capacity will be reduced by nearly 100, adding suites, a concierge lounge and a spa area. “We also believe we’ll be able to make it open-seating dining,” she says.

The color scheme also will be updated for a more contemporary look. In the Seattle headquarters, the riverboats are referred to as having a “wedding cake look,” with bright hues of red, white and blue. “The new color scheme will be deeper, richer, more classy colors,” Moore says.

“There is a lot to overcome on the Delta Queen side,” she adds. “While the product has always been great, Delta Queen went bankrupt in 2001, then Katrina happened after Delaware North bought them. There’s been a lot of bad luck with the brand, so that’s why we decided to buy the assets and not the brand.”

Travels With Cathy

In the late 1990s, I interviewed Cathy Guisewite, the cartoonist who created the comic strip Cathy in 1976. Click on the player above to hear Cathy or read the story below that I wrote for ASTA Agency Management magazine.

“Over the years, I’ve grown very fond of travel agents, and now I find myself wondering how on earth are these poor people going to stay in business. It seems as though the travel industry is doing everything to drive travel agents out of business.” - Cathy Guisewite

Regular readers of the comic strip “Cathy” are familiar with the strip’s sympathetic take on travel agents. But they may not know that creator Cathy Guisewite began the travel agent strips, which run periodically in the “Cathy” cartoon, because she was the “world’s worst customer.”

“When I was single, I would book 12 tentative itineraries based on meeting my hypothetical boyfriend by the time I left,” says the Los Angeles-based cartoonist. “I couldn’t commit, would change my mind, would hate to make decisions.

“And then after the travel agent had invested all this time into putting together a trip for me, I would call up and ask if I could use up all my frequent flyer miles for the hotels and plane travel. Nobody actually screamed on the other end of the phone, but I always felt it was happening once I got off.”

So Guisewite began sketching Mabel in the role of a travel agent who faced such daily adversities as fickle clients, unstable pricing, commission cuts and other assaults on the travel agent’s livelihood. “I started thinking about what that job entails,” Guisewite says. “And I guess I did those first strips because I wanted travel agents to have a little voice through me.”

And indeed many travel agents do feel they have that tiny voice through Guisewite - or at least some comic relief from their daily frustrations. Guisewite says she receives regular fan mail from travel agents. “They tell me that I am speaking for them,” Guisewite says. “Or that it was like I was standing in their office when I created a particular strip.”

Truth is, however, that Guisewite has not even set foot in a travel agency - at least not for a “very long time.” Nor does the creative source for her travel agent strips, syndicated to more than 1,400 papers worldwide, come from an industry insider or shadow travel agent (ironically, she has yet to meet her own travel agent face-to-face - but more on that later.)

Rather, what Guisewite knows about the industry comes from her own experience of dealing with agents and from research. She routinely clips newspaper articles about the industry woes. But, of course, the real genius of the strip is Guisewite’s own brilliance and her understanding of people. “She just has this innate ability of getting into people’s hearts and minds,” says her publicist at Universal Press Syndicate.

“I inherited all of my indecision skills from my mother,” Guisewite says. “So to go away for two days, I need to pack seven pairs of shoes.”

Hat Tricks

A display attached to a hat reads:

First class-$240

Business class-$140

Full coach-$90

Saver-$80

Super Saver-$75

Superduper Saver-$70

Red Eye-$60

Rock Bottom-$48

“How much is this hat?” Cathy asks.

“That depends,” replies Mabel, the sales clerk.

“Depends on what?”

“We’ve decided to sell hats the way airlines sell plane tickets. Every hat in the store has been given up to 20 different prices at any given time that change weekly, daily or sometimes minute to minute. How much you pay for your hat depends on how desperate we are to unload it versus how desperate you are to buy it. Hats purchased 21 days in advance of hat season are, of course, cheaper than last-minute hat buys, and all prices are lower if you plan to keep the hat over a Saturday night.

“Once you’re paid, any exchange of the hat will be a minimum $50 fee,” Mabel continues, “even if all we have to do is say, ‘Here’s another hat.’ ”

“I don’t care what it costs!” Cathy bursts out. “”Just sell me the hat!”

“Oops,” Mabel says. “Sorry the last of our hats were reserved while we were chatting.”

That strip was based on a real-life episode with Guisewite’s travel agent, Sheila Laituri of Pepp Travel, an ASTA member in Encinitas, California. On the phone, Laituri was searching fares for Guisewite when the two veered off subject. “I had the lower fare, but while we were talking, I lost it,” Laituri says. “I had to call her back and tell her. She was good about it. She understood, but that’s where the cartoon came from. I thought it was clever that she could take something like a classic airline reservation and make something so funny out of it.”

Guisewite sent Laituri the strip on hats, but the cartoonist has never actually set foot into Pepp Travel’s office. Nonetheless, Guisewite understands the travel agent’s plight perhaps better than those who spend “too much” time in agency offices.

“We do enjoy working with her, because she understands the industry so well,” Laituri says. “She understands about fees and would rather pay them than try to find a cheaper fare on the internet. She understands the joys, frustrations and craziness of this ever-changing business.” (As a demonstration of her gut intuition, Guisewite warned us that her agent would say nice things about her. “Don’t believe them,” Guisewite says. “We drive them crazy.”)

Nagging Mother

Born in Dayton, Ohio, on September 5, 1950, Guisewite attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She walked with a B.A. in English in 1972, then went to work as an advertising writer. Rising the ranks, she became a vice president in the advertising industry.

But all along the way, her romantic life was unfulfilling. On nights when she wished she were dating, she sketched cartoon strips and routinely sent them to her parents. Her mother nagged Guisewite to send sample strips to a few cartoon syndicates. Caving to her mother’s desires, the devoted daughter sent drawings of her “miserable love life” to Universal Press Syndicate in 1976.

“Chances are the world isn’t screaming for a new comic strip as loudly as I’m hoping,” she wrote to Universal Press Syndicate Press that year. “But I have an idea for new comic strip that the world might like a lot if someone besides my mother ever got a chance to see it. So here it is. It’s a strip about being single in a pretty unusual time. About being a woman in a pretty unusual time. Mostly, I guess, it’s a strip about just being a person at any time - the most marvelous thing that every happened to anybody.”

The letter included several sketches about a female character whose circumstances were remarkably similar to Guisewite’s (later she begged Universal Press Syndicate to let her call the strip anything but “Cathy.”)

“If you’d like to see more,” the letter continued, “I’d be happy to send some more. If you’d like to talk about my idea, I’d be very happy to talk - any day, any place. If you should think I should concentrate my spare time at vacuuming instead of drawing cartoons, I won’t be happy . . . but I guess I’d like to know that too.”

Within a week, she had signed a contract with United Press Syndicate. The first “Cathy” comic strip made its debut in a few dozen newspapers on November 22, 1976. Striking a chord primarily among single women, the strip was an immediate hit.

“Cathy” even spawned 21 books, including The Child Within Has Been Awakened but the Old Lady on the Outside Just Collapsed; Thin Thighs in Thirty Years; Wake Me Up When I’m A Size Five; and A Mouthful of Breath Mints and No One to Kiss. The newest, Shoes: Chocolate for the Feet, was released this fall.

Quarter of Century and Still Going Strong

Now in her 25th year of “Cathy,” Guisewite says she has no plans to slow down. Though she married in 1997, she says she can relate to single women, because she was single for so long. “A lot of what I write about, even if Cathy is dating, is just male-female relationship stuff, and if anything, I have a lot more fuel for that now because I’m actually with a guy, so I’m not just reading about guys in a magazine anymore. I actually know what one is like up close.”

Also unlike Cathy, Guisewite is a mother of two (a four-year-old son through the recent marriage and an eight-year-old daughter who she adopted in 1992). Motherhood has made the shift to Cathy’s mindset more difficult. Guisewite now leaves her home for a nearby office to help make the transition. “I spent the first hour this morning arranging play dates, getting the weekend set up, getting my daughter’s school pictures ordered,” she says on the day that we called, “so it’s quite different.”

She counts her lucky stars that the strip was successful. The fact that she is able to work on it daily is therapeutic, she says. “It is a great way for me to get out all of my anxieties,” she says. “Travel is a great example. With the strips I’ve done about the travel agencies, I’m trying to be empathetic about what I’ve put these people through as I make my own plans.

“But also there are a lot of frustrations that everybody deals with in travel,” she adds, “with delays, with packing, with how big the carry-on can be, with other people who carry on too much stuff, with the food on the airplane, with waiting on shuttle buses and all that stuff that everybody gets mad about. I get to get mad about it and then go home and write about it and make a living at it. So it’s a great way to voice all that frustration.”

Because of such frustrations, however, Guisewite enjoys travel less now than she did in the early days of her career. Nowadays, she travels primarily for vacations. The devoted mother seldom boards a plane for business.

And she’s the first to concede that she’s not the ideal traveler. “I like to get somewhere, but I hate to make the arrangements,” she says. “I hate to decide when I’m going and I hate to commit. I hate this system now where you have to commit weeks and weeks ahead to get a good price. It defies everything that I love, which is waiting until the last second.”

She pauses: “And of course, I can’t stand to pack.”

Too bad. Because Guisewite would be a travel agent’s dream client. Certainly, she would not ask her agent to redeem frequent-flier points for the flight and hotel.

And if you were her agent? She would know that she is lucky to have you as her agent, rather than the other way around. “Nowadays,” Guisewite says without a trace of insincerity, “I’m always groveling for mercy when I call the travel agent because I know all that they have to go through.”

Cathy on Cathy

In the early days of Cathy, cartoon Cathy bore a striking resemblance to her creator. Over time, however, Guisewite has turned around her own life.

Cartoon Cathy was (and still is) short and roly-poly, about 50 pounds overweight. Guisewite is 5′ 2″ but only about 100 pounds. She was 50 pounds heavier in college.

Cartoon Cathy eats an entire cheesecake to deal with her problems. Guisewite eats only half the cheesecake.

And although Guisewite has married since beginning the strip, she vows that “Cathy” never will. “I feel like that’s a voice that needs to be heard in the paper,” she says. “I know what it’s like being single and everyone around you being married. You feel as if you’re stranded alone. I would hate for Cathy to abandon those people, especially older women who still are single and need a friend.”