TTG – Cruise – The boss of Marella Cruises: “We work with more agents than ever”

Tui recently made a new play for third-party agent support with a new “Try us” commercial messagee – Did Marella therefore benefit from the efforts of its parent company?

Managing director Chris Hackney is unequivocal: this year has been the best in the line’s 28-year history, during which it has carried more than 350,000 passengers and worked with almost 200 new agents.

In fact, things are going so well that Marella felt confident enough to increase its Atol by around 15% in September, from 355,521 authorizations to 409,852, putting it among the top 10 Atol holders .

The number of new cruise passengers is increasing, new destinations are entering the market and customer satisfaction rates are the highest ever. And importantly, for Hackney, more and more third-party agents are interacting with the line.

Agent Incentives

In May, Marella launched its first-ever “commercial-scale” booking incentive, offering agents the chance to win a spot on a Caribbean cruise in 2025. To participate, agents must register a package booking Marella before December 31. The more they book, the greater their chances of winning a place.

As XXL At press time, nearly 2,300 agents had participated in the “Make it on Marella” incentive program, which Hackney said helped boost third-party agent sales. “Approximately 1,300 travel agents sold a Marella Cruises ship last year – this figure included 199 new agents for us,” he reveals.

Additionally, Hackney says the line’s four-person sales team has trained nearly 13,000 travel agents. Despite this, the line does not intend to recruit more staff in contact with the trades to support its training program.

However, Hackney emphasizes that the line is constantly reviewing the structure of its sales team.

“We accelerated things and we saw the fruits of it,” he explains. “The biggest challenge in the industry is giving guests the first-time cruise experience. We are working with more agents than ever and have seen the number of new cruise customers increase. Now we see them come back two, three and four times.