Okay, it's like this...

So, we're cruising along on Southwest at 30,000 feet on our way to Las Vegas to speak at the Travel Leisure conference as I write this.  It's amazing to me all the things we can do today that we couldn't when I first got into the travel industry in the 70s.  Technology has changed all of our lives!  As travel agents we no longer have to rely on airlines for our air ticketing systems. We don't have to use the telephone to call our cruise line and tour operator partners to book their products.  We can now book air tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, cruises and tours online The Internet has changed the way travel agents purchase travel for our customers.  It is certainly more time and cost efficient, and because of this, we are able to pass on additional savings through private sales to our customers.

But, the Internet has done more than that.  Now Mr. and Mrs. Consumer can purchase their travel online as well at what, at first glance, seems to be at lower costs than by booking through a travel agent. 

Or, can you really???

Would you consider doing your own taxes if you had a lot of deductions and filing your taxes took you hours and hours of your precious time?  If you are a two-person working household, would you be willing to give up sending your laundry out and losing that time on the weekends and nights that would be required to take up your time washing and ironing all of those shirts and pants?  Or, if you had appendicitis, would you consider going on the Internet to find out to take it out yourself to save a few bucks?

Of course not!!!  But everyday, we hear of people who are booking cruises online themselves based strictly based on price.  Because we are travel professionals, we know that there are distinct differences in cruise lines, just as there are in hotels and restaurants.  The worst thing that can happen is to book that cheap cruise for your honeymoon and find out that the cabin has upper and lower beds.  That's right, bunk beds!!  But, it was at a better rate than a travel agent quoted.  Why?  Because we know what the categories on a ship are and that we would never give a quote to  honeymooners in a cabin like that one.  Yes, our price maybe $25 per person higher, but it's not bunk beds!!

The Internet is a great place to research travel, especially destinations.  But, when it's time for the pedal to meet the metal, it's time to talk with a professional who can direct you to the vacation that is compatible with your lifestyle.  Save yourself heartache and let us help you fulfill your dreams.

Outta Here!: It's Showtime!!!

Outta Here!: It's Showtime!!!: " Charlotte Lawson, our NCL rep Well, it's that time of year again. We are definitely in Wave Season, as the cruise lines call it,..."

It's Showtime!!!



Charlotte Lawson, our NCL rep

Well, it's that time of year again.  We are definitely in Wave Season, as the cruise lines call it, when the wave of bookings for vacations for the year, picks up steam and culminates in a tsunami as we had last Sunday.  On January 30th, we held our 24th Annual Cruise & Vacation Supermarket at the Cool Springs Marriott in Franklin, TN.  After a very, very snowy week, we didn't know what to expect.  But on that day, the weather was perfect - 50 degrees and overcast.  

Sabrina Hampton, one of our agents





  

We set up our show the night prior and all of our reps from our travel providers were in town getting ready for our show.  We had done all the right things.  Our advertising had been effective and people were calling our office and the hotel daily to get more details.  The unknown in this equation was how many people would show up and how much business we would book.  As it turned out, everything gelled perfectly.  We opened the doors at 10:00 am and about 100 people swarmed in.  By 10:30, our reservations area was full.  By 11:30, we had a line waiting to see an agent to make a reservation.   What an incredible day!!! 

By the end of the day over 3000 had come through our doors.  They attended our seminars on Alaska, Europe and the Caribbean.  They visited the Holland America Alaska motorcoach parked outside the hotel.  The won hundreds of door prizes from our travel providers.  And, they booked vacations - lots and lots of vacations and cruises!!!  We are still booking vacations as hard and fast as we can.  If you were unable to attend, you can still take advantage of our show specials and super sail deals by clicking here.  

We could not pull this show off without the support of our travel providers - Sandals, Island Routes, Travel Impressions, Regent Seven Seas, Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises, Apple Vacations & AM Resorts, Holland America Line, Carnival Cruise Lines, Princess Cruises, Cunard, Globus Family (Avalon Waterways, Globus, Cosmos, & Monograms), Azamara Club Cruises, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, and Celebrity Cruises.

The room at 10:30 am

Here's some more pictures from our show.  Don't you deserve a vacation this year?

Royal Caribbean's booth was very busy all day

Celeste Pevahouse with Princess and Cunard



Erin Miller with Apple Vacations and Carlos Gonzalez with AM Resorts

Dawn Bolte and Kyle Brock with Sandals



Steve Smith from Oceania Cruises



Tracie Mosley with Carnival







January 4, 1988: The Rest of the Story

Well, it actually all began in October, 1987.  I had been in business with a partner for six years.  Our little company, Pacesetter Tours, was an outbound tour operator.  We took about 3000 people to the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, TN from my office in the basement of our house.  After the Fair, I found us booking more and more groups like taking University of Tennessee fans to the Sugar Bowl, and Vanderbilt University fans to the Great Alaskan Shootout in Anchorage.  We were also booking a lot of incentive groups on cruises.  Then, we started getting more and more requests from individuals who had travelled with us wanting to book cruises.

Charlie and I talked at length that October about changing the entire direction of the company and becoming a cruise-only agency.  Being the pragmatist that he is, Charlie insisted that I contact a number of cruise-only agencies around the country in markets similar to Middle Tennessee.  I had a list of questions, and the last question on my list was "If you had it to do all over again, would you?"  Every single person I spoke with answered with a definite "Yes, but I just wish I had done it sooner."  That solidified our decision to proceed with plans that we had been formulating.

The first week of November, 1987, Charlie went out-of-town on business.  When I picked him up at the airport on Friday night, he asked me what I had done all week.  When I told him I had contacted all of the cruise lines and told them that we would be opening as a cruise-only agency on January 1, Charlie's first question was "What year?"  Naively, I said 1988.  He immediately said we had to do a business plan, buy my partner out, find an office, and an entire laundry list of things that had to be done.  While he was gone, I had found an office.  The picture isn't our first office, but it was very similar.  I think you get the idea that we started our small, very small.

Well, long story short, we put together our business plan, went to our friendly banker who turned us down for a loan because we just needed a line of credit, bought out my partner, and opened our doors as Just Cruisin' , Tennessee's first cruise-only agency, on January 4, 1988.

I had done a lot of preliminary work getting press for our little company for our big opening week.  We had stories in the Tennessean, the Nashville Business Journal, were on a radio talk show, but on January 8, I was scheduled to be on "Talk of the Town", a midday local TV show on our CBS affililate. On that particular day, Nashville got a BIG snowfall - 8" to be exact.  Because of the weather, I was the only guest who showed up that day, and my 6 minutes segment turned into 12 minutes.

The company consisted of me - and Charlie when he could help because he was a chemical engineer and had a "real" job that sustained us for a time - and we left our phone on the recorder while we were gone.  Upon our return, the machine was full with 30 messages, all wanting information on cruises!!!

And, as Paul Harvey would say, that, folks, is the rest of the story...

Oh, the Places You'll Go!!

As I was working on my Christmas list this year, I decided to make a picture album for two couples who are our best friends.  We have been traveling together for the past twenty years and have made memories all over the world.

Some of our favorites are the "man-on-the-street" interviews that Charlie and Jim have done from Rome to Hawaii, to Cape Cod and all over the world.  These are all spur-of-the-moment, funny interview on where we are and what we are doing.

There are so many memories - like the "I, Snorkel Bob" incident in Hawaii when the David, Charlie and Jim convinced a store clerk that they were from a television station in Chicago and wanted to interview Snorkel Bob, a Hawaiian icon.  We got out of Dodge before Snorkel Bob could get to the store. 

There are memories of the train trip through Italy where the trains went on strike three times in the ten days we were there.  And, we all will never forget our getting on the wrong train that we thought would take us to Florence, but we ended up in Naples.  Needless to say, our (Charlie's) Italian needed some work.

So, I made an album of our trips over the years.  You can see it by clicking here..  To say that we have had fun over the years is putting it mildly.  I guess what we cherish the most is the lifelong friendship that we have with these folks.  Thanks for the memories, David and Linda B and Jim and Linda T.  To quote Dr. Seuss, "Oh, the places you'll go!"

Delayed

We travel a lot.  Some of our travels are for fun and vacation; some are for business.  Yesterday was a business trip.  Charlie and I were speakers at the Home-Based Travel Agency/LeisureWorld Conference in Atlantic City. 

We woke up at 5:30 am to start a long, long day of travel.  Our flight wasn't until 10:30, but we had to take Liesel, our Schnauzer, to our dogsitter, then muddle through rush-hour traffic for almost 30 miles back to the airport in Nashville.  No problems.  We got to the airport at our required "two hour prior to departure" time of 8:30.  Zip, zip, zip.  We were through security in record time.  Great way to start the day.

Then, things started to fall apart.

About 45 minutes prior to our scheduled departure, an announcement was made that air traffic control in Philadelphis had given us a ground hold in Nashville because of weather.  We now would not depart until 11:00 am.  At 10:30, our original scheduled time of departure, we had another announcement.  The President was in Philadephia, and we now were delayed because we could not land there until air space had been cleared for commercial aircraft after his departure.

Finally at 11:20 we boarded our plane.  This time we sat on the tarmac in Nashville, again awaiting clearance from air traffic control in Philadelphia so we could land when we got there.  At noon we finally left.

Great.  We would only be two hours late, which, of course, made us late for the trade show that we were supposed to be in that afternoon.

The flight was uneventful UNTIL we reached air space coming into Philadelphia.  Then we rocked and rolled.  Literally.  The tornado watch we had in Nashville the day prior had turned into storms that were hanging over Philadelphia.  So, we bumped and grinded our way through this air space...for an hour...as we circled Philly waiting to land from all of the air traffic that was backed up from the morning delays.

Finally, we landed in Philadelphia two hours and forty-five minutes late, and we still had an hour and a half drive to Atlantic City.  Oh, well, the best laid plans.......

If you didn't know, the game, Monopoly had all of the streets named after the streets in Atlantic City.  We drove down Atlantic Avenue to our hotel, the Trump Taj Mahal.  And, this morning, we crossed North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio Avenues to get to the Convention Center on Michigan Avenue.  At one point we were on Baltic Avenue.  Our hotel has Virginia Avenue on one side and Boardwalk on the back overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.  As we were walking on the Boardwalk tonight, we both had flashbacks to The Sopranos and the scenes of Tony looking out to sea as he stood on the boardwalk.

Tomorrow we head back to Nashville, and with any luck the President will stay home, the weather will be clear, and we won't be delayed again. 

Ch..ch..ch..changes!!

When we opened Just Cruisin' Plus on Jan. 4, 1988, there were so many cruise lines operating that it was impossible to know which ones went where.  The days of preferred suppliers was extremely important.  As travel agents, we had to be very selective in which cruise lines we would support and which would support us.

Over the years we have seen change and more changes as cruise lines have taken over other cruise lines, completely changing the face of today's modern cruise industry, then some of these going bankrupt.

The first was a shock when Princess Cruises gobbled up Sitmar and changed the names of all the Sitmar ships to "something" Princess.  Then, Royal Caribbean bought Admiral Cruises, followed by Chandris Fantasy, which changed the name of this cruise line to Celebrity Cruises.  Premier Cruises (The Big Red Boat) purchased Home Lines, taking their one ship (Royale) cruise line to three ships.  Holland America Line bought Windstar Cruises, but have sold this arm in the past couple of years.  Majesty Cruises was purchased by NCL and all of their ships were then named Norwegian  "something". Then, NCL went on their buying spree and purchased Royal Cruise Line, Orient Cruises and Royal Viking Line.  The Royal ships were moved into the NCL fleet; the other two cruise lines kept their names, but eventually went out of business.  Then, Princess took over Cunard.  Dolphin Cruise Line was purchased by a holding company, and their ships became Regal Cruises. Carnival got into the buy-out frenzy and now owns Holland America Line, Princess Cruises and The Yachts of Seabourn in North America; P&O Cruises and Cunard Line in the United Kingdom; AIDA in Germany; Costa Cruises in Southern Europe; Iberocruceros in Spain; and P&O Cruises in Australia. Radisson merged with Seven Seas and became Regent Seven Seas.

Then there were others who were not as lucky.....American Hawaii, Commodore, Premier, American Family, Regency, Epirotiki, Delta Queen, Pearl, Sun Line, Bermuda Star, Dolphin, Ocean, Regal, Windjammer, and Renaissance to name a few.  These companies all went bankrupt or just ceased operations.  The Renaissance ships have all resurfaced today as Oceania Cruises, Azamara Club Cruises, and a couple of Princess ships. 

On Saturday,. we got an announcement that another cruise line went bankrupt - Cruise West.  Click on the link to see the details as reported in Travel Weekly today.

If you think it's difficult to keep up with all the changes in your industry, try walking in our shoes.  When we first opened, the changes were occasional.  Now, we see them almost weekly, if not monthly.  But change is good, right?  Right?  RIGHT?