Taking a page from politicians and rock stars, Carnival Cruise Line will wrap a motorcoach with colorful signage and hit the road next month in a first-of-its-kind bus tour to visit travel agents in a number of Southern U.S. cities.
The weeklong "Agentpalooza" tour kicks off in Houston on May 11 and travels to New Orleans the next day. There will be "Rockstar Moments" in those two cities in which agents will be encouraged to record video segments for online sharing.
After a weekend break while the bus makes it way to Charleston, S.C., the tour will resume there on May 15. It then proceeds to Atlanta and Jacksonville, Fla., before wrapping up in Orlando on May 18. There will also be a surprise stop in an unnamed Georgia city along the way.
Adolfo Perez, Carnival's vice president of sales and trade marketing, said the tour is an extension of the line's Travel Agents Rock sweepstakes as well as its Carnival Conversations series.
"We've done Carnival Conversations for several years. They're sit-down, do a presentation, have a panel discussion, pretty formal-ish," he said. "So we thought we've been really hitting hard with this Travel Agents Rock campaign. Why not have some fun with that?"
Carnival Conversations was started in the wake of the Carnival Triumph engine room fire in 2013, which sent the cruise line's public image into a tailspin. Carnival brought its senior sales executives to agents around the country to mend fences with travel sellers, hoping they would help rebuild Carnival's customer relations.
Carnival made dozens of changes to its trade policies based on feedback garnered through Carnival Conversations. It is a measure of how far it has come that Carnival no longer needs to keep the Carnival Conversations format.
The bus tour is a staple of political campaigns, musical acts and has also been used to promote sports teams and some corporate marketing events. Perez said the bus itself will serve as a backdrop to various "zones" that will be used at the stop to run several types of activities.
"We'll have the ability to have those conversations about business, because we'll have a whole zone set up to discuss business, our [business development managers] will be there, I'll be there, the sales leadership team will be there," Perez said.
Another area, the Carnival Fun Zone, features a DJ, photo booth, lawn games including minigolf, some games played on Carnival ships and a display for distributing goodies from Carnival's Cherry on Top candy store.
There will also be a zone dedicated to community and charity. Cruise giveaways will be tied to contributions to a local food bank. Agents will be asked to bring canned goods and dry food to donate. Perez will also be raising funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, a charity many cruise executives support.
While part of the Agentpalooza tour is light in tone, Perez said it will also show appreciation for agents and keep the momentum going in that area by bringing top Carnival sales executives to town.
"It's really about engaging with them and telling them that we care and celebrating the amazing wave season we've just finished and [that] they deserve some fun and a pat on the back that only Carnival can deliver," Perez said.
Carnival will be sending agents emails that disclose the exact times and places the bus will be arriving, and Perez also urged agents who are interested to register through the GoCCL.com portal, since space is limited.
There are no plans to do an Agentpalooza style tour in other regions of the country, although that option remains open, a Carnival spokeswoman said.
Perez said that more than three decades ago he took a two-week tour of Europe in a bus as a 20-year-old student. When he was elevated to the top sales job at CCL in 2015, the idea of a bus tour occurred to him.
"This is something I've been wanting to do since I first took on this job," he said. "I don't know if anyone else has ever done it; I don't think so. But it's the first time for us for sure."