In its 1.5 years of operation, Princess Cruises' Web-based Polar Online cruise booking engine has become the line's number one source of bookings, surpassing any single GDS system; Cunard also now uses its own version of the technology for online bookings by agents. Starting at the end of April, agents who use both Polar Online and the TRAMS' ClientBase software to manage their business will find it a breeze to manage their Princess and Cunard bookings. POLAR Online will become the first major in-house cruise booking system to link directly with ClientBase, which is used by 40,000 travel agents to manage their customer relationship management program. The result, says Jan Swartz, Princess' senior vice president of customer service and sales, is a seamless product that will allow agents to put away the pen and paper and just let the integrated system keep track of what a customer has done. So if an agent sends out a ClientBase mailing, and then the client calls in, the agent can hit a button, book with Polar Online and all the data, including the fact that the customer was responding to an e-mail promotion about Alaska, for example, will be stored in their database for back-office operations.
