New website monitors cruise fares for travel agents, saving cruisers money
Weston, Florida (PRWEB) September 17, 2014 -- A new website, cruisefaremonitor.com has just opened its travel agent portal following a successful launch of their client site one year ago. The cruise travel site is estimated to save cruisers $3.5 billion annually.
There is a policy in the cruise industry seldom used effectively by travelers to save money. If the price of a cruise drops after deposit is made, cruise passengers are often entitled to rebook at the lower rate without penalty. Travelers aware of this policy may check the cost of their cruise periodically to see if a price drop has occurred, but this is time consuming and requires luck as price decreases are often temporary and may rise again. Travel agents also have difficulty finding the time to monitor price drops for a large client base.
Cruise lines do not inform clients that the price of a previously booked stateroom has dropped. Travel websites have no mechanism for letting clients know that the cost of a cruise booked through them has declined. Until now, cruise passengers and their travel agents had no fast and reliable way of detecting a drop in their cruise fare.
The fact is, cruise lines frequently lower fares multiple times between a passenger’s booking and the final payment date. Often, these decreases occur multiple times in a single day to fill undersold sailings, attract people from certain parts of the country, pull in previous cruise passengers or, to target a certain demographic – such as those aged 55 and over.
This supply-and-demand change in prices offers a unique opportunity for cruise passengers and travel agents to save money – if only they had access to quick and reliable information on daily rate changes.
Enter cruisefaremonitor.com (CFM) – the brainchild of a University professor and his travel agent. Together, they created and designed a fully automated ingenious method for cruise passengers and travel agents to quickly and reliably monitor changes in cruise fares – at a nominal cost.
Here’s how it works. Clients book their cruise, go to the CFM website and key in their cruise line, ship, sail date, stateroom category, number of people per stateroom, state of residence, whether they’re age 55+ and if they are a past customer with the cruise line. It takes less than a minute to do this. If CFM is monitoring that cruise and stateroom, CFM will provide unlimited e-mail or phone text alerts up until final payment date or until the ship sails.
For travel agents, they login to their accounts and enter the same criteria that a passenger would. The difference is the agent is providing the service for their client and will be able to change the passenger’s fare with the cruise line as soon as they receive the alert. They may also be able to upgrade their clients if an upgrade alert is received. The travel agents quick response will save their customers money and build customer loyalty.
The unique feature of CFM is that cruise passengers and travel agents will typically know about a drop in the price of their cruise before anyone else – enabling them to rebook at the lower rate before it disappears.
It’s even possible for savvy travelers who have yet to book a cruise to sign up with CFM to identify a set price or upper limit they’re willing to pay for a specified stateroom category on a given sailing, and let CFM do the daily legwork to determine if the price drops to their limit. If it does, clients are alerted immediately.
Cruise lines now being monitored include Azamara, Carnival, Celebrity, MSC, Norwegian, Oceania, and Royal Caribbean – a list that may expand in the future. Right now CFM is only available to U.S. citizens.
cruisefaremonitor.com welcomes travelers and travel agents to use their state-of-the-art technology to save money on cruising.
___________________________________________________________
About cruisefaremonitor.com (CFM)
CFM is based in Weston, Florida. For more information, please visit cruisefaremonitor.com.
Follow CFM alerts on twitter @cruisefaremon
Find us on Facebook cruisefaremonitor
Jay Olshansky, CruiseFareMonitor, LLC., https://cruisefaremonitor.com/, +1 8473478585, [email protected]
Share this article