Medallion Meltdown

[Botany Sun Downers]

Well, U gave the tine. TA took up our summary as the Princess CS dept also could not sort it. 
TA banged on the Pacific zone office , and now we have 7 of 8 nights sorted.

noted the site was down for maintenance yesterday, not surprised.

will visit TA this week to plan next and sort the final.

thanks to  all you cruisers  for your help and recommendations

we will see u on board, 😎at dinner , hopefully 🤔

 

[dockman]

3 hours ago, memoak said:

Not only is there no reason to but usually cruise lines will not deal with you if you have an agent things have to go through them

 And once upon a time the idea was that the commission paid to travel agents was to compensate them for selling and handling questions re the bookings...saving the cruise line $$ as the agent not cruise line employees were to deal with client questions etc .....then lots of people booked direct with the cruise line who answered all the questions but then later turn it over to the agent because the agent would rebate a chunk of commission to the clients....so if cruise line tells you to ask your agent instead of expecting the cruise line to pay a commission PLUS deal with the client I can understand why.  Agents who rebate most of their commission may not be real anxious to also have to provide much service.

[Botany Sun Downers]

Yes Dockman, I think the operative words are ‘once upon a time’.Since 

commision percentages have been stashed since Covid days.

Most  of us are well travelled, business oriented and can sort most issues in a timely way.

You may Thomas Cook found trying maintain the past, or client assess control  caused their demise.

 

[esad9556]

4 hours ago, dockman said:

If i recall the current president of princess was very heavily involved in the creation of a lot of the app tech so is he ashamed to admit he did not get it right and too proud to get it fixed?

I think of the old adage  "you rise to the level of your incompetence"!

[esad9556]

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Edited October 7 by esad9556
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[dockman]

1 hour ago, esad9556 said:

I think of the old adage  "you rise to the level of your incompetence"!

The peter principal as i recall.

[dockman]

2 hours ago, Botany Sun Downers said:

Yes Dockman, I think the operative words are ‘once upon a time’.Since 

commision percentages have been stashed since Covid days.

Most  of us are well travelled, business oriented and can sort most issues in a timely way.

You may Thomas Cook found trying maintain the past, or client assess control  caused their demise.

 

Commissions are still a huge expense to cruise lines and i have no doubt that sooner or later the bean counters will zero in on further reducing them.  There are many options like using improved artificial intelligence to develop virtual online cruise agents that will be able to answer most any question as well as give you an HD virtual reality tour of the ship including the view etc from every room on the ship, every table in the dining room, etc etc. 

They may also decide to stop allowing agents to "take over bookings" and earn full commissions especially if more agents rebate a good chunk of their commissions to clients.

 

I have been around long enough to remember when the airlines cut agent commissions first to five percent and then eventually to zero the route cause was so many agents were rebating half or more of their commission to corporate accounts thus undercutting the airlines direct corporate account business.  That and improving technology and changing customer habits now have customers doing almost all their own work to research schedules and book fares, pick their seats, pick a special meal...all tasks that agents or airline employees used to do. 

 

I have read as quantum comptuing is further refined that the programs will eventually be able to scan the entire world wide web in a few moments and "learn" and "remember" and customize the answers to just about any questions that have ever been asked on the web.  There is no human that i am aware of that knows every room on every ship, every ports details, every shore excursion, transfer option, etc  and has the answer to every question anyone can think to ask.  Scary stuff but it is coming.

 

Yes there will likely still be some clients who want to deal with an agent on the phone or in person but those numbers will decline rapidly if the cruise lines offer a cheaper rate for the do it your self client using online technology.  Artifiical technology is going to be a major game changer someday in the selling and servicing of cruise clients.  It has a way to go but it is coming as sure as the sun sets in the west.

 

Another looming factor is that more and more airlines are now attempting to sell cruises to their massive data base of travellers.  Book your cruise through an airline and receive rebates in the form of frequent flyer miles.  The airlines also see those billions of dollars in commissions and want a chunk of it.  Right now the airlines are dabbling on the edge of cruises but i fully expect they are testing the waters.  Southwest just announced they plan to start selling cruises to their data base. Perhaps the airlines will use their expertise to create online artificial intelligence as they seem better at tech than the cruise lines.

 

I also expect the really big .com cruise sellers who already have very good websites to invest heavily in making it easier and easier to book online with little or no human involvment.  Less humans/employees eventually means less expense so it may well develop into the airline model of do it yourself but if you want to talk to a human you will be charged more.

 

There will be stumbles and trials but over the coming years I have little doubt that there will be some massive changes to how cruises are sold booked and serviced.

 

 

 

 

 

[Rick&Jeannie]

11 hours ago, dockman said:

I have read as quantum comptuing is further refined that the programs will eventually be able to scan the entire world wide web in a few moments and "learn" and "remember" and customize the answers to just about any questions that have ever been asked on the web.  

That's a little bit scary...there is so much *misinformation* on the web.  If the AI reaps this info as well in its answers, well...

 

[dockman]

certainly we can only hope that AI will somehow be able to disregard all the misinformation on the web and separate facts from opinions and especially conspiracy theory nonsense...i do not pretend to understand it all but it does seem well suited to answer the 10000 most frequently asked questions accurately, to show real HD virtual ship/cabin tours etc etc?  imagine you are considering several different cabins and with the click of a mouse you could take a virtual tour of the rooms, see the views, walk to the locations etc etc...imagine you want to pick your dining time and table location that it was all readily available to view and select online...why not?

 

I have found over and over that as a frequent long time cruiser i seem to know way more answers than a new cruise agent or princess agent who has maybe been on a couple of cruises in their lives...not only do they often not know even worse they don't admit they don't know and give wrong answers.

 

According to physicists, this parallelism allows a quantum computer to work on a million computations at once, while your desktop pc works on one.