Cruise Planners has announced the addition of Destination Hub, a new directory platform, to CP Central that will allow travel advisors to search, view and submit business recommendations for destinations across the globe. Advisors can submit and view recommendations for numerous business types including restaurants, hotels, shopping, transfers, tours and activities.
Destination Hub is designed for advisors to leave written reviews, star ratings and photos of their experience with businesses visited by them or their clients. Business listings in Destination Hub can be filtered by geographical location, name, type, businesses in their “favorite” list, and those they have recommended.
“One of the hallmarks of what makes our organization unique is the willingness of our advisors to collaborate and share information,” said Michelle Fee, CEO and founder of Cruise Planners. “We could see our advisors had so much insight to share and our technology team got to work creating a space where it could be organized and easily accessed for a robust library available to our franchisees.”
Cruise Planners also this week hosted its first-ever “Boot Camp + Tech Day” training seminar in Fort Lauderdale from January 20-22. In previous years, although both events were stand-alone workshops, owing to travel advisors’ suggestions, Cruise Planners will offer two of these combined workshops, with the second taking place later this year in Las Vegas. “Tech Days” are dedicated to familiarizing advisors with the numerous proprietary and custom-build technology tools created to streamline the booking process and beyond for the Cruise Planner advisor network. “Boot Camps” offer an in-person learning event with home office presenters, supplier training, sales skills, social media programs, business analytics and technology workshops with results-oriented action items.
Brian Shultz, chief information officer, Cruise Planners, said: “We have several exciting new applications such as LivePlanner, Trip Summary 2.0, Destination Hub and Amenity Tracker so we know this will be a valuable session for our advisors to help with the strong wave of travel bookings.”
Sessions included:
- LivePlanner – This session focused on Cruise Planners patent-pending application that allows advisors to have a real-time, live consultation session with their clients
- Task Manager – This session was a deep-dive into all things Task Manager. From templates, to tags and everything in between, Cruise Planners’ tech team took attendees on a guided tour of how tasks can help keep them organized
- Ask Maxx – A free-form session where advisors got to ask the tech leadership any questions they had from any of the various tools they have to work with
- Social Media – The exclusive CPsocial Program continues to help franchisees grow their digital marketing with tips and tools on social, search and online reputation
- Find a Hotel – Powered by Navitrip, this new booking engine allows advisors to search over 100,000 hotels and adjust their commission and savings for their clients just by using a toggle bar
- Trip Summary 2.0 – This is a major enhancement to Cruise Planners’ current Trip Summary that allows advisors to easily create one for their clients at the click of a button
The “Boot Camp” portion included a robust trade show and panels with over 45 supplier partners and a presentation on land travel. This is the first of five nation-wide “Boot Camps,” with another combo with “Tech Day” to be held in Las Vegas (February 24-26) and the other three slated for Boston (February 3-4), Orlando (February 17-18) and Dallas (March 3-4).
For more information, visit www.cruiseplanners.com.
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