Travel Insider
February 23, 2003

A growing number of cruise sellers are trolling the waters of the Internet, hoping to hook visitors into booking, not just looking, online.

Dozens of travel Web sites, including www.expedia.com and www.travelocity.com, sell ship cabins. In the last few months, discounter www.hotwire.com has begun marketing cabins with partner CruisesOnly; www.orbitz.com has streamlined its cruise-booking engine; and a new booking site, www.7blueseas.com, was launched by a Pasadena company.

More of us are taking the bait and booking online, but the numbers remain minnow-sized. Despite advances, the Internet is still a better place to research a cruise than to book one, most experts say.

"I wouldn't do it," Anne Campbell, co-owner of www.cruisemates.com, an information Web site for cruisers, says of online booking. "I would want to talk to someone if I was plunking down thousands and thousands of dollars."

Mike Driscoll, editor of the weekly trade newsletter Cruise Week, agrees that booking by mouse is a bad idea "unless you're really a veteran cruiser who knows all the pricing."

Despite recent discounting, a cruise is a big investment. It typically runs at least $2,000 per couple per week in the Caribbean, including airfare, Driscoll notes. Booking can be complicated.

Besides sorting through a dozen or more cabin categories, you may need to book airfare, pre- or post-cruise hotel stays, shore excursions, dinner seating and more. Each line attracts a different crowd and has different rules.

All this can be intimidating, especially for first-time cruisers, who make up about half the people sailing today. It helps to consult a travel agent or cruise representative. So it's not surprising that online bookings provided only 4% of cruise lines' revenue in the U.S. market last year, according to PhoCusWright Inc., a travel industry research company. Still, that was twice as much as in 2001, and the figure will increase to 10% by 2005, the company projects.

Why go online?

There's an incredible amount of information on the Internet to help evaluate cruise lines and ships, advocates say. It's great for comparison shopping; some sites sort ships by price or compare itineraries. It's a fine way to reserve a cabin too, some say.

"It's possible not to talk to a travel agent ever and get enough information online to book," says Sharon Dodd, editor of www.cruisecritic.com, another cruise information site.

Nearly everyone agrees that Internet travel sellers can have great deals on cruises. That's especially true of the mega-sites such as www.travelocity.com and www.orbitz.com. On the other hand, a bricks-and-mortar agent who deals regularly with a line will get good prices too.

One tactic some travelers use is to find a good price on the Internet, then challenge their travel agent to match it. That way they get Internet pricing along with the personal touch.

Here are some useful cruise sites for looking or booking:

Looking: Many Web sites offer reviews of lines and ships. But quality varies. Reviews on www.smarterliving.com, for instance, depend heavily on the lines' own Web sites and press releases, features editor Anne Banas says. Not surprisingly, they tend to be glowing.

Among well-regarded sites for more critical reviews are www.cruisecritic.com and www.cruisemates.com, which dispatch writers to check out the ships. The evaluators are often hosted by cruise lines, but while aboard, CruiseMates' Campbell says, she collects feedback from paying guests too.

"I wouldn't exactly call the meals on Amsterdam 'cuisine,' " she writes of the Holland America ship. Its spa, on the other hand, gets a thumbs-up.

Lively reader reviews and chat rooms on these two sites are even more blunt and a good source of gossip on the latest cruise adventures and misadventures. Take it all with a grain of salt, but take it, experts say.

Booking: I recently test-drove some better-known Web sites that sell cruises. I found booking online could be cumbersome and saved me little or nothing over booking with an agent or directly with the line. But it was far from a complete survey.

The paucity of discounts probably was because I chose a holiday cruise: a July 4 sail of Carnival's Ecstasy from Los Angeles to Ensenada, Mexico, and back. Another date might have produced more deals.

Booking on Carnival's own Web site, www.carnival.com, was an ordeal. There were seven steps; for most, I waited a minute or more for the system to retrieve data. Carnival's Terry Thornton, vice president of marketing planning, agrees the system is flawed. He says the line is developing a new booking engine.

Booking on www.travelocity.com, www.orbitz.com and specialists www.cruise411.com and www.7blueseas.com was easier and faster. Each site provided deck diagrams, plus photos and descriptions of cabins, at convenient stages in the process.

But fares were listed differently on different sites, and even on the same site.

On the Carnival site, the fare was first stated as $479 per person, double occupancy. But the final price was $537.88: a $390 "modified cruise rate" (basic fare), $89 "non-commissionable fare" (port charges, I was told), $19.88 "miscellaneous charges" (government-related fees and taxes) and $39 "insurance" (various coverage; automatically added unless I removed it).

On most of the sites, the initial fare listed was the basic fare plus port charges, but on www.cruise411.com it was just the basic fare.

Most sites matched the price for my cabin that Carnival posted or took off $10; www.7blueseas.com took off $24.07, or a bit more than 5%. (Prices may have changed since I did my research.)

I called a travel agent specializing in cruises and was quoted Carnival's price.

In the end, it seemed like a long walk around the deck to save 5%. Besides, a good travel agent could tell me what none of the Web sites did: Is the show lounge above my cabin?

New York Times
February 2, 2003

FEW people reflect the changing nature of travel consumers in general, and cruise aficionados in particular, as much as Rebecca Fix. Ms. Fix, a stay-at-home mom in Lyndhurst, N.J., last month arranged to go on her second cruise, and the first for which she did the booking. She invested all of an hour researching trips and prices online, then spent $1,500 for a four-day Caribbean cruise for herself, her husband, Glen, and their 8-year-old son, Eric, without so much as calling a customer service agent.

''I figure when you call customer service, they're just looking at a computer screen with the same information you're looking at, so why bother?'' she said.

While Internet users have warmed quickly to the idea of booking airline tickets, hotels and car rentals online, they have been slower to place all their faith in the Web for more complex and costly purchases like cruises. Cruise industry analysts and executives say that only 30 to 50 percent of those who research cruises online actually complete their purchase without calling the company for details -- or, more likely, for assurances that their credit card number won't find its way to a hacker.

But the legion of cruisers willing to go without such verbal assurances is growing, thanks to the ever-lengthening track record of secure transactions among cruise sites, and significant improvements in Web site design. According to a survey late last year by PhoCusWright, a travel-industry consulting firm, among online travel buyers, 19 percent bought a cruise online in the previous 12 months, compared with 5 percent over the same period a year earlier.

Cruise.com is a case in point. The company has for years been among the top five cruise sellers on the Web, according to industry analysts -- a remarkable achievement, given the site's considerable deficiencies in years past. As recently as 14 months ago it was difficult to find the site's booking engine, while even two weeks ago you could not find photos of a cruise ship's cabins, dining areas or pools.

That was scheduled to change this month, said Anthony Hamawy, the site's vice president and managing director, with the rollout of an overhauled Web site. Cruise.com's new search function, featured on the home page when I tried a beta, or test, version of the new site last month, is fast and intuitive, and -- unlike many other cruise search functions -- it lists prices for different cabin classes on the first results page. On other sites, the search engine typically yields a list of ships with the cheapest available price for a cabin on each ship. For those not interested in a windowless cabin on the lowest deck, though, such an approach can lead to wasted clicks.

The new incarnation of Cruise.com was also much more visually appealing than past versions. Once users find a ship of interest, the site offers a layout of each deck. When you drag the cursor over a cabin number, a cabin photo pops into view -- at a size generous enough for you to get a feel for the décor and dimensions. (When I tested the site, some of the photos disappeared mysteriously, a glitch the company said may have happened because I use a Mac. It said it planned to address the problem before the new version of the site makes its debut.)

Travelocity.com has been offering such a feature to its users since late last year, which is one reason Ms. Fix chose that site to book her cruise. ''They showed us exactly what the cabin would look like and where it'd be,'' she said. The last time the couple went on a cruise, Ms. Fix added, they were all the way at the bottom of the boat with no view. ''It was like being stuck in a broom closet for three days, '' she said. Travelocity, which is owned by Sabre Holdings, a travel reservations company, revamped its search engine in December, according to Bryan Saltzburg, the company's director of cruises. When a user selects cruise preferences -- like the date, the region and any price limits -- the search results include the ship, its category (premium, luxury and the like), the itinerary and the price for a selected cabin class. The site also offers ship ratings, from one to five ribbons.

The Web site's Cruise Deals section is worth visiting before you hit the search engine. I recently found a three-night Bahamas cruise on Norwegian Cruise Line for $149 for an inside stateroom (on the Majesty), and a seven-night cruise to the Mexican Riviera on Royal Caribbean International for $500 (on the Vision of the Seas).

In fact, it's worth checking out the deals from the major online cruise sellers, including CruisesOnly.com, Expedia, Cruise411 and Orbitz, as well as some lesser-known sites like iCruise.com and 7blueseas.com, before booking. Cruise line executives, fiercely determined to fill every spot on their ships, appreciate the broad audience and buying power of these Web sites, and frequently give them last-minute deals to publicize.

You can avoid a lot of clicking around to these sites by trying CruiseCritic.com first. The site, which offers reviews, ratings and other information to cruise travelers, scans various publications and Web sites each week, and lists what it considers the best deals on its Bargains section. (The link for News and Bargains is on the home page.)

According to Sharon Dodd, CruiseCritic's editor, the site makes no money on these listings, so it has no incentive to promote one company's bargain over that of another. (The same is not necessarily true for other travel Web sites, which are sometimes offered incentives to promote a particular company.) Ms. Dodd said that the site earns money only by selling banner advertisements, and by licensing its cruise line reviews and ratings to other sites, like Travelocity, Expedia and America Online, among others.

Besides offering bargains, CruiseCritic.com features user reviews and message boards, which can be a great way to uncover information that reviews miss. For instance, in the Community section, I typed in ''Norway,'' the name of a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship, and received a list of about 40 reviews; most concerned the Norway itself, while others only mentioned it.

One reviewer criticized the ship's entertainment, likening the shows to ''good high school productions,'' and strongly recommended that parents take a set of walkie-talkies to help locate family members because of the ship's size. Such critiques and advice serve as a good supplement to CruiseCritic.com's own reviews, which are written -- quite thoroughly, in most cases -- by staff members and freelance journalists.

It should be noted that other sites, like Expedia.com, also offer user reviews, and in some cases there are far more to choose from. Expedia, for instance, featured 83 user reviews on the Norway (accessible once you have chosen a particular cruise on the ship), in addition to the CruiseCritic review it showed on the site.

George Cochran, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board in Fishers, Ind., relied on CruiseCritic's reviews late last year to choose a Caribbean cruise on the Carnival Pride -- a trip that his wife, Mickey, ultimately booked on Cruise411.com.

While Mr. Cochran gathered all the relevant information online, Ms. Cochran steered clear of the computer, choosing instead to call the reservations agent at Cruise411.com who had booked previous cruises for them. ''The only hang-up is, they've sometimes got a quite lengthy waiting period, of about 10 minutes,'' Ms. Cochran said of Cruise411.

''But I'm the type of person who has a lot of questions,'' she said. ''And I'm also the type who likes to deal with a familiar person. So I just walk around with the phone stuck in my ear.''

The Boston Globe
January 26, 2003

Cruise prices include a whole lot - but not everything
By Richard P. Carpenter, Globe Staff

Price ratings

The Web site 7 Blue Seas (www.7blueseas.com) has launched a price based ShipShopper Index to help compare prices.

The index analyzes prices over an extended time, based on the least expensive yet widely available cabin category (that prevents cabins sold as loss leaders from skewing the results). The higher the index number, the higher the price a given ship, may be able to command. Thus the Carnival Conquest, with a 125 rating, will likely cost more than the Carnival Ecstacy, with a score of 89.

that doesn't give you the price for a specific cruise, but helps you learn where the bargains may be. In addition, the index can signal a better value. For example, someone trying to decide between two identical seven-day Caribbean cruises priced at $599 on different ships might check the index. If one ship is rated 120 while the other has an index of 100, then the first cruise represents a better deal because vacationers have been consistently paying 20 percent more.

Travel Weekly
December 4, 2002

NEWS - Agent Issues
7Blue Seas charts new course in online travel (12/4/2002)
By Laura Del Rosso

PASADENA, Calif. -- One of the first lessons veteran entrepreneur Daniel Kwoh learned upon entering the online travel field is that few customers who log on to www.7blueseas.com decide to book a cruise on line.

"Most of our customers book by calling our toll-free number because they feel more comfortable talking to a travel agent," said Kwoh.

A newcomer to the travel industry, Kwoh is not a newcomer to technology -- or starting new companies.

He is a physicist who received his bachelor's degree from Princeton and graduate and doctoral degrees from the California Institute of Technology.

He later worked in tactical and strategic defense technology for TRW.

In 1990, with partner Henry Yuen, he co-founded Gemstar (now publicly traded Gemstar TV Guide Interactive) and was the co-inventor of the VCR Plus system, whose five-digit code is a standard feature of VCRs worldwide.

Kwoh also is a charter member in Angel Investments, which invests in high-tech and Internet companies.

How did a man who was named Best Entrepreneur of 1990 by Business Week magazine end up deciding to enter the hotly competitive online travel arena?

"I wanted to get into the online travel industry, and there were already the big players -- Travelocity and Expedia -- so I looked for a new angle," said Kwoh, who launched 7Blue Seas in October after two years of planning.

Kwoh's concept is to use interactive multimedia technology to enable consumers to access comprehensive cruise information and book their travel on line or via toll-free numbers, seven days a week.

"Broadband is starting to arrive and, to sell travel successfully on line, I believe there needs to be a deep multimedia site, particularly to focus on cruises," he said.

7Blue Seas has agreements with major cruise lines, including some blocked space on specific cruises. The site includes a "hot sales" section, video, photos, deck plans, ports and destination information and articles about cruise experiences on various ships.

Kwoh said that less than 5% of cruise vacations are booked on line today.

He attributes that low figure to the lack of consumer understanding of the complexities of booking a cruise, including the difference between cruise lines, ships or ports of call -- information not easily available to most consumers, he said.

During the initial launch, 7Blue Seas used the content and booking engine of third-party provider CruisePath, but in the last two weeks it has dropped that system in favor of its own system, which, like CruisePath, enables clients to book directly from the cruise lines' own inventory.

Kwoh said the company is on track to bring more technology improvements to the site in first-quarter 2003.

"One of the key aspects will be [being] able to let consumers very quickly and successfully find the deal that they want and find where the bargains are," he said. "We are going to become the most comprehensive Web site of cruise information."

Kwoh, the major investor in 7Blue Seas, declined to disclose how much he has invested.

The Pasadena headquarters employs 17 people, 10 of them in the company's call center.

Kwoh said the call center staff is made up of longtime travel agents and some personnel who have moved from cruise lines' call centers to join 7Blue Seas.

The company has started advertising, mostly through click-through Web advertising, newspapers and some magazines and radio.

Kwoh said he believes 7Blue Seas soon will establish itself as a "credible and serious" site, particularly with the cruise lines.

"The lines have recognized us as the new kid on the block, and I think we are getting pretty close to level ground with the big players" in terms of prices that 7Blue Seas is able to negotiate, he said.

The Mature Traveler December, 2002