Apple is known for quality products, great customer service at its Apple stores, and a strict pricing policy. Ever wonder why Apple products are never discounted? Apple requires all of its suppliers to charge the same price – no discounting and extremely limited value adds. Late last month Carnival announced a new policy effective 8/1/12 to all their suppliers regarding how their product can be marketed and priced – no discounting an no value adds (IE onboard credit offers)– period! How does this affect you the consumer, Carnival, and us the suppliers …..
Why did Carnival make this decision? Carnival feels as though they have a very competitively priced quality product. They want to avoid confusion in the marketplace with many vendors offering different promotions at different times. They feel as though discounting devalues the Carnival brand and want to maintain integrity in their pricing models. I believe they also feel that any of the suppliers who are working with razor thin margins by large discounting cannot afford to service their clients very well. If the supplier is not providing outstanding service to the client they end up calling Carnival – defeating the whole purpose of paying the supplier to sell Carnival cruises and service their guests.
How does this affect you? First, you can now be assured that whoever you call to help you with your dream vacation on Carnival you will be getting the same price and same offer for the cruise portion of your vacation. Consumers will now be selecting who they wish to book their cruise with based on service and not price. Often CruiseOne will have special promotions such as no deposits required, shore excursion credits, or cash back offers. These can no longer be offered on Carnival cruises. Any supplier found to be discounting or adding these value additions will lose their ability to sell Carnival.
How does this effect CruiseOne? From my perspective I think it will help the industry as a whole. We pride ourselves on providing outstanding service to our clients. We can save money for clients in other ways such as recommending shore excursions that save clients up to 25% on cruise line excursions. We often book transfers at 50% the cost of booking with the cruise lines. We recently saved a client over $700 from published airfare by utilizing one of our partnerships with an air consolidators. A supplier who might spend one to two hours working with a client to find them the perfect cruise will now not have to worry about a competitor coming in after the fact and offering a small discount (because they did not do any of the work) and ‘stealing’ the client. Carnival wants to protect the work the original agent did and we applaud that!
Donna and I always have believed we offered great prices and exceptional service. We believe that finding the best value to match a client to their dream vacation is not the same as the finding the ‘cheapest cruise’. And now we have Carnival backing us up!
Happy Cruising!
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