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Meetings aboard ship are limited only by the planner’s bottom line and enough deep water. Let’s get creative. You as a planner decide to organize a sit-down dinner for 700 attendees from a global insurance company who say they “want something different.” Heard that before? So you come up with St. Petersburg, Russia and the opulent Catherine Palace commissioned by Peter the Great in 1710. A Baltic cruise to boot. Wow, good idea! Oops, somebody beat you to it.
A batch of cruise companies develop their own theme cruise inventories, which takes all kinds of work off the planner’s plate before they even pick up the phone. All your group needs to do is show up, because the entertainment’s already booked. Likewise the professional chefs, baseball players, photographers and a host of others.
That’s the message the cruise industry has been pitching to incentive travel planners for years now—and it has been a success. The cruise incentive market is booming, and “we’re becoming a regular part of the buying cycle” for planners, says Richard Weinstein, vp for corporate and incentive sales at Carnival Cruise Lines.