Hi everyone,
I’m noticing that in some of my destinations, a lot of my listeners come from visiting cruise ships. Does anyone have any experience with how to promote tours to cruise lines and/or directly to cruise ships?
We’ve had conversations with a number of cruise companies over the years, and with a few of them those talks went right up to board level. They liked the product and could see exactly why their passengers would value it, but these deals are really difficult to close. The reasons are structural, not a matter of pitching better, so I’ll go into a bit of detail here.
A cruise line makes a surprising share of its money not from the cruise but from what it sells you on board: drinks, the spa, the casino, and shore excursions. When the ship docks, they sell a guided tour of the port for $100 or more. The margins are excellent and the audience is captive – you’re on a boat with nowhere else to buy. Excursions are one of the most profitable lines in the whole business.
With VoiceMap, a passenger steps off the ship, opens the app, and does a self-guided tour of the same port for $10 or so: cheaper, flexible, at their own pace. The passenger loves it, and so do the cruise line’s own product people – we’ve heard as much from them directly. It’s not that they think it’s bad. It’s that they think it’s too good. A weak add-on, they’d happily bolt on. A strong substitute for one of their most profitable products makes them far more cautious.
There’s a deeper problem, too. Once a passenger buys that first tour – even from the cruise line – the app is on their phone. At the next port, they can skip the excursion desk and buy direct. One sale, and they may never buy an excursion from the ship again.
We might persuade them eventually, but possibly only by stripping out a lot of what makes VoiceMap worth having: the low price, the independence, the wide range of tours, maybe even the VoiceMap app itself.
But as you say, your listeners are already finding your tours on their own. So in my opinion, it’s best to ignore the cruise line companies for now and try to raise awareness among their passengers:
- Make your port tours easy to find for someone about to dock there, e.g. with cruise-specific info in the Directions to the Starting Point.
- Get into the places cruise passengers plan their days: roll-call threads on Cruise Critic, itinerary- and ship-specific Facebook groups, and the “things to do in [port]” searches they’re already running. (We already run Google Ads against many of those searches.)
- Offer a great experience and get reviews. Cruise passengers talk to each other constantly, and they book through OTAs a lot – which are all review-driven marketplaces.
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A positive mention on the Cruise Critic board for a cruise that visits your port is a big help.
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I can confirm what Iain wrote. In Rotterdam, I’ve even flyered when a ship came in with 3,000+ passengers, but sold only one tour. The problem was that people who came off the ship had already made plans of their own and were hard to convince to do something else, like taking a VoiceMap tour. Or didn’t bring their earphones.
I think focus should be on getting the app known worldwide in general.
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