Why Is Cruise Retail The Forgotten ‘Middle Child’ Of Travel Retail?
4 minutes read
Introduction by: Peter Marshall
This is an important, frank and fairly controversial article from Adrian Pittaway, Owner and CEO of Cruise Retail Academy. Despite the exponential growth of the cruise line travel retail business, it remains largely misunderstood and, according to Adrian, there is a clear need for the cruise line sector to come together to better communicate the very real opportunities for brands and people.
Since inception, Adrian’s Cruise Retail Academy has become an integral part of the business and, in the second half of his article, you will also discover two new services that were launched at TFWA Cannes last week that will help raise the bar for brands to build expertise for front line crew. The first is a localised, Uber-style, onboard freelancer service specifically designed for cruise retail training and support where and when needed. The second is a digital service providing a single platform for brands to train cruise retail and beverage teams – regardless of who the operator or cruise line is. Both are important additions that will maximise knowledge and service in this burgeoning travel retail sector.
Simply put, this is a must-read.
This year marks my 10th anniversary representing the cruise retail industry at Cannes TFWA. Representing this small, but highly strategic corner of the travel retail community gives me a sense of pride of how brilliantly agile, unique and incredible our sector is, but also continually having to face the sheer weight of misunderstanding from the rest of the community.
We are growing fast. Probably faster than any other part of the travel retail industry. By 2028, I estimate that cruise retail sales will be worth over $4billion per year, and the trajectory will be that we should easily hit $5 billion by 2032 based on current new build investment and onboard revenue growth. When you have such high potential, and such opportunity why then, do we feel like the ‘forgotten middle child’ of travel retail at Cannes.
The simple fact is this. Travel retail teams are continually changing, evolving and being reshaped. Restructuring, labour turnover, regional remodelling and business focus means that much of the time the expertise needed to understand and nurture cruise retail is simply being lost internally. Handovers are focusing on the core business of airports, and as such that much needed understanding and expertise of the complicated nature of cruise retail is quite often lost.
For 10 years, I am sure I am not alone as a cruise retailer feeling that I was in ‘Groundhog Day’ explaining… “it’s a ship not a boat”; “no we don’t sell in port”; “no, you can’t have a 200m2 personalized shop-in-shop”; “yes, the ship will move from EMEA to Americas”. It is no wonder that many brands have decided to not put their energy or investment into our channel. The constant expertise and understanding needed is often simply too overwhelming for brands to build a consistent and stable business model for, especially with so many business pressures. The expenses and the challenges that can be encountered in cruise retail often outweigh the perceived benefits internally.
And this, sadly, is why we as a sector of travel retail must shout our corner so much louder than any other part. Great initiatives are generally not understood, and amazing innovations that have overcome many of the obstacles are not recognized for their sheer determination. I look at the amount of amazing and truly groundbreaking Frontier awards entries and the lack of success to hammer home this point.
I know many of my colleagues from the cruise retail sector are pretty frustrated by this lack of understanding, and to be honest I don’t blame them!
So, how do we turn the annual “cruise is important to us” and “ah yes, we saw the cruise ship in the harbour” typical opening lines of business meetings at Cannes into “cruise has been and is going to be a consistent part of our business growth strategy, here is what we have done”?
This is the $4 billion question.
My view is that, as controversial as this is, we in the cruise retail industry must unify our message where possible and provide an ever-available educational starting point. Continuing to attract investment, expertise and importance in cruise to senior management of travel retail business units is essential if the cruise retail industry wants to deliver growth by optimising brand opportunity. The honest challenge with this idea is that cruise retail is a totally disconnected sector, which is ultra-competitive and in continuous tender mode that makes the unification of message extremely complicated and challenging for us to present together. We have tried already with the help of trade organizations like ETRC but ultimately failed.
This is where I am trying to support a little bit at Cruise Retail Academy, a bit like a “United Nations of Cruise Retail”. My aim is to provide a pathway for brands to achieve success by offering solutions that do not favour one operator over another, nor create any level of mis-trust. Having a fairly high profile in our industry helps me a little to act like an ambassador for it. This year at Cannes, I have introduced 2 different innovative services and the feedback was pretty encouraging. The first is our onboard freelancer service, which is essentially providing a localized ‘Uber’ service to frontline cruise retail training / support where and when it is needed. The other is a digital service providing a single platform for brands to train cruise retail and beverage teams no matter who the operator / cruise line is. With our partners at frontline this is a truly innovative approach to delivering a cross-category ‘trinity’ solution. The goal is a simple one, to help build a consistent expertise-led pathway for brands to optimize the most important part of our sector – the frontline crew. This is worth at least 50% sales potential in cruise retail, so that means there is a $2 billion prize to be won! And if we can deliver this, then everyone wins – the brands, the operators and the frontline teams!
The recent TRUnblocked walkthrough video of the amazing retail setup onboard the new cruise ship Aroya created by Gebr.Heinemann shows very clearly and visually the true potential of cruise retail, specifically the real quality and uniqueness that the channel offers to brands. With this amazing potential in mind, if I have a goal, it would be to arrive at Cannes TFWA and get to all the 30-minute meetings going straight into the detail, rather than providing the usual “it’s a ship not a boat” introduction speech! One can only dream the dream!!!
