Norwegian Cruise Line, as part of its ongoing commitment to Partnership 2.0, announced today that it is realigning its North American sales team to provide better customer service to its travel partners.
The newly structured sales group will be led by Camille Olivere, vice president of sales, and will report to Andy Stuart, executive vice president. The group includes four key areas of focus, headed by sales directors who report to Olivere.
Additionally, the enhancement includes the creation of a new inside sales team that will work with the realigned field sales team, and also along with a new automated customer relationship management database.
Patrick Mitchell, vice president of global sales strategy and planning, will be adding resources to augment his focus on growing the company’s charter, corporate meeting and incentive business (CM&I), which will continue to be led by Brandon Townsley, who has been with Norwegian since 1999.
“As part of Partnership 2.0, we wanted to ensure that our sales team was optimizing its resources to effectively support the travel partner channel and to work closely with them to not only service, but grow, their business with us,” Stuart said. “We took a very thoughtful and strategic approach to this realignment, incorporating feedback from a travel partner survey we conducted which asked them to rank the level of importance of attributes influencing their travel recommendations to their own customer base.”
The new sales structure includes Online Travel Accounts, led by Alex Pinelo with 25 years of experience in the cruise industry, and Strategic Accounts, led by Joe Jiffo, who has been with Norwegian since 2000 and has more than 28 years of experience in the travel industry.
Also included are Industry Relations, led by Clark Reber who has been with Norwegian since 1996 and has 19 years of experience in the travel industry, and Field and Inside Sales, Home-Based and Consortia, led by Wayne Peyreau, with Norwegian for the past 11 years and with the industry for 27 years.
The newly-created inside sales team, based in the company’s Miami headquarters, will provide travel partners with readily available points of contact, hoping to improve the company’s ability to help travel partners understand and sell the offers by Norwegian’s Freestyle Cruising.
“The goal with this realignment is to optimize our resources and be smarter about how we reach and service our travel partners,” Olivere said. “We have just 10 percent of the industry’s capacity, but we have the challenge of having the same size customer base as the rest of the industry, so our resources really needed to be maximized for high performance.”
Norwegian has also launched a new automated customer relationship management (CRM) system that is integrated with the line’s reservation system. This new system has the ability to identify customer trade preferences for promotional opportunities, among many other benefits.