On Sale Today: The Travel Advisor's Cruise Line Handbook

Our newest work is now available! Michael, Chris, and Scott talk about today's release of their third book - The Travel Advisor's Cruise Line Handbook.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to Beyond the Handbook. Practical insight from the minds behind the manuals. Your hosts are the authors of the best-selling Travel Advisors Handbook Series. Hall of Fame cruise counselors, Michael Lakana and Chris Crumb. And elite cruise counselor, Scott McAllister. It's time to go beyond the handbook.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

I'm reminded today of the movie Back to School with Robbie Dangerfield, where he goes with his son to college as a 60-year-old freshman or whatever he is, and then they accuse him of cheating, and he has to go and take all of his exams orally, and all the teachers are hitting him left and right with all these questions, and he finally gets through the whole thing. So a bit of a spoiler here. And he goes, Whew, I feel like I just gave birth to an accountant. You know, the old Rodney Dangerfield thing. Well, gentlemen, we have in a way given birth because today is the official birthday of our third book. Can you believe it's actually out today in the public? We have no more control over it. And I, for one, am super excited. Um, book three, which is the Travel Advisors Cruise Line Handbook, hits the virtual bookshelves today. And I know some of you got a taste of it because we gave them out on our seminar at sea last week. Um, we gave so we sold some at Cruise 360 as a pre-sale, but officially it's on sale today at Amazon.com and also through Apple Books. I could not be more excited. Who I'll tell you what, we'll start with Scott. Scott, maybe give us an overview of the book and what you're most excited about people seeing in this book.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Well, as soon as I wake up from the dream I'm having, right? First of all, it's number three and it's live. Yeah, I know, right? It's like, wow. But you know, Chris, as you know, because I've shared this with you and I I think with Michael as well, I've already used this book, you know, so you asked me to kind of give a synopsis of of its layout and everything, but think of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I just aged myself, showing up.

SPEAKER_03 2:12

Well, you didn't say world book encyclopedia, which would have been the one I would have said, so that's perhaps even older. But go just putting us in that same category scares me with where you're going with this.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Yeah, and you know, it's it's laid out just like an encyclopedia would be, right? We've got all the cruise lines, well, not all of them, but the majority. I think we have 98% of them.

SPEAKER_03 2:33

We certainly have all the CLIA lines in there, I'll say that.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

100%. And we we've checked and double-checked, of course. You know, as soon as a new one uh joins, we're gonna have to do it do that.

SPEAKER_03 2:45

Well, we'll get to that at the end, but please continue.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Exactly. But you know, the other day, as an example, I needed a phone number for Royal Caribbean. And rather than trust the interwebs, because you know, we just did a recent podcast on how you know that information didn't always be accurate and everything. So I I went to the book that we wrote. Oh, I know it's accurate. I wanted to Royal Caribbean and verified the the phone number was able to call the right department and everything. So uh another time is I needed to find out who's going to this particular destination and what time of year. Well, instead of going to the internet, which could be pulling data from three years ago, and I need current data, you know, I pulled out the book and you know, looked up, hey, who's going to the ABC Islands this time of year and everything, and was able to have a great consultation with the client because that's where they wanted to go. So hopefully those little stories give a general idea of the book, its purpose, and and why we wrote it. I'm already using it.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

Yeah, and I mean to kind of give people an outline here, uh, each chapter, if you will, is a different cruise line. And what we have done is we have given you the basics of those cruise lines. We've given you uh their ships and the sizes and how many passengers are on board. We have given you the overview of the cruise lines, the important phone numbers and websites to have. Think of it as a quick reference guide to have on your desk. And like Scott said, if you if you need to talk to Royal Caribbean, you pop it open. Here's the phone number for the main number. Here's the group's number if there is one, here's the travel agent website so you can get into the TA portal. All of that in one concise place. And then, Michael, you did a lot of the legwork on the actual cruise line research and put together this wonderful section for each of the cruise lines. Why don't you talk about the the data that's included there and the uh the reasoning behind what we included?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Well, you we we we tried to think about you know who who is the reader going to be? And um, you know, sometimes it will be someone who's an expert on one particular cruise line, um, and they know it through and through. Is this book a value to them if they're not really interested in the other lines? Well, what we thought would be a nice little piece to add um that would help them as well as others is uh selling tips. Yeah. So this is sort of our perspective on having reviewed all the lines, what is some what are some points that are special about the one that you're an expert in? And again, short section, it's our opinion about it. Is it of use to you? We certainly hope so. Um and then also uh for those who are um looking at maybe what are the other lines that might be serving that destination, um, I would suggest not just looking at the size of the ship, but in the selling tips is a quick way to see what's the distinction between those lines.

SPEAKER_03 5:40

That's a great point. And we do, as uh both Scott and Michael have alluded to, there are a couple of indices in the back where we have sorted the cruise lines by destinations they visit, also by the type of cruise. Is it ocean, river, expedition, and so on? So you can quickly find those. But our thought, and Michael kind of alluded to this a bit, is you're probably an expert if you sell cruise on at least one line. There's one line where it's your go-to. I know this one, I feel comfortable. And so you can probably not every those pages are not gonna get very worn. But the idea behind this more was of a, okay, one day you get a call and somebody says, I want to go on and let's just choose an outlier, Quark Expeditions, for example, or or maybe Atlas Ocean Voyages, or maybe they want to do Paul Gogan and see Tahiti and Bora Bora, and you're not as familiar with those brands. And suddenly you've got to go, okay, gosh, I need to have a quick primer on this, and there you go. We've got you those kind of five or six bullet points that will at least give you an overview of what you're looking for. And then, as Michael and Scott also alluded to, uh, let's just say you have somebody that wants to do Antarctica. You can see all the lines that go to Antarctica, and then you can go read those sections and go, all right, that one's probably too big. My customers didn't want to ship that big, but I can scratch that one out. But it's a way for you to get quick answers and have an idea of what you can tell your clients and uh hopefully help you better understand those cruise lines. Now, Scott, I'm gonna jump to you again real quick. There are a few things that we couldn't include, and I'll mention one of the big ones because we're gonna get this question a lot. Why are there no deck plans? And I'll let you address why there are no deck plans in this book. A couple of reasons to be honest.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

Well, we didn't want to have to clear-cut Sherwood Forest to create enough pages to include all and you know, Chris, I and I'm glad I'm so glad you brought this up. If we had gone that route, not only would the book be too thick to it really would be the Encyclopedia Britannica, right? We'd need a we'd need one book per cruise line almost, uh, and then we'd have to include a free bookshelf with purchase like they used to do in the old days. But in addition to all that, a lot these cruise lines lately have done such an amazing job of amplifying and updating their ships and everything, they're almost out of date as soon as the ink dries on a deck plan. And you can't put everything in, even on a deck plan. It for my old eyes, if we were to put a deck plan in the book, this thing is what, like nine inches by six or something like that. That's exactly right. I can't even see it. Yeah, um, it's just gonna be a blob. I can't I can't make out room numbers, uh restaurant descriptions and names and things like that. That's better online where it's updated in real time and old people like myself can zoom in and out and research that way.

SPEAKER_03 8:30

And we do give you a path to that in the books, but another thing as Scott alluded to is the book would have had to be in color because all the um the um the deck plans are color-coded because they're different categories. And then the color cost of printing the book, this book literally, and we did look at what it would cost to do a fully um complete encyclopedia with every ship listed and every deck plan listed. And the cost was literally over a hundred bucks for the book, and that's just not feasible for the average travel advisor when you can get much of this information in other places. What we wanted you to do is have the basic, direct information to be able to find the answers you need and not have to dig around on the internet for 10 minutes for it. That was the thought process basically behind the this book, as a as I said before, a quick reference. And another thing that we actually wound up doing was paring this down, guys, because originally we were gonna have every ship having its own page, its own photo, its own information. And then we realized that we couldn't get everybody in the book, and as Scott kind of alluded to, we were gonna need three or four books, and then again it becomes at $15, $19, $20 a book. Now you're having to spend $60 to $80 to get all of the books to have the set. And while that's great for us, it's not so good if you're the average travel advisor wanting to have a copy of this book. So, Michael, um, talk about maybe a couple other things we haven't mentioned or your favorite part of the book or or what you hope people take away from it. Uh the floor is yours. Have at it.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Well, where I think the biggest value of this book is, you know, I I there may be people asking the question, why do I need a book? I can just find everything on the internet.

SPEAKER_03 10:10

Yeah, Michael, I can find everything on the internet.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Why do I need this book? You're welcome. When you think you can find everything on the internet, you can ask any question you want, and there'll be a lot of information that's going to come pouring back at you. Um but there's a couple things about that information. One is it's a deluge. It's trying to get a sip of water out of a fire hose. Good apologize. How do you how do you actually distill out what you want? And the second thing is um, do you really know where that water's coming from that you're you're sipping from? Because, you know, in the old days of old days of search, you would put in a query and you'd get a pretty balanced, honest uh list of um uh of responses from possible sources. Now, information's being pushed at you. Um you want something objectively, and what you're getting is whoever paid the most to market it to you. So, what I really like about having everything in one volume, it gives you sort of uh an objective, well-organized body of knowledge so that that's a good place to begin your research. Will it end there? No, of course not. You'll still want to go to a supplier site, or there's a few other good sites for deck plans, for instance. Um certainly want to go to the supplier for things like um, you know, travel agreements and their rules and their policies. Um, but our book is a really good starting point. Instead of being, you know, a uh a fire hose of water from who knows where it came, it's well organized and it is clear drinking water for your.

SPEAKER_03 11:47

There you go. I love it. And I I will say also that one of the things that makes a return in this book that was in our first two, is what we call the asides, where we step out of the book as a as a set of authors and give our opinion or our favorites on things. So, for example, you might see on a certain cruise line, here's something Scott tried and really loved, or Michael has a tip on this cruise line because he sailed on this particular ship. And so that comes in throughout the book. We also have had some guest uh asides or guest authors, if you will, pop in. Uh, some of them are BDMs, some of them are uh or other people that are involved with these cruise lines, and they've come in to give their favorite tips on selling the lines or tips on things you don't want to miss on a particular brand. And as we grow, and this is leading to the final point of this, hopefully more of those will pop into future works. Because when you buy this book, you're gonna notice that on the top it says 2026 edition. And the reason for that is this is a book we plan on updating every year, because as Scott and Michael both touched on, things change. New ships come into the fleet. Uh, cruise lines change their marketing slogans or they change their uh their positioning. For example, Celebrity just got into the river cruise market. That is in the book, but since we wrote the book and sent it off to the publisher, they decided to build 10 more ships. Those will be in the 2027 edition, and that's why we wanted to also keep the cost down, was we didn't want you paying $50, $70, $80 for this reference book, and then it's outdated in a year, Michael.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Um, you know, I I think it would be a disservice to the reader if we failed to add one of our favorite parts of the book is uh you'll see it on the cover, you'll see at the beginning of every chapter. But it is a stylized artwork that is um, you know, sort of in the theme of blueprints and architecture. Uh, just an acknowledgement to um Chris for having worked endless hours putting all of those together. And um, you know, I believe uh Scott was pulling together a lot of the source material of imagery to work from. Um, I mean, I think that the uh look and feel of it um you'll really appreciate.

SPEAKER_03 13:53

Well, thank you for saying that. I think Scott gets the brunt of that work because he pulled the ship photos for every single ship, and then we wound up deviating and only using one for each cruise line for space. Because for people that don't know, we we were published through Amazon and they have a limit to how many pages you can have in a book. And we found out pretty quickly that, oh my gosh, even if we just did ocean lines, we are gonna be over the limit if we count all the ships. And it literally came down to do we want to have six volumes of this book, or do we just want to find what is the pertinent information uh that we want to have in this and be able to include all the cruise lines? And ultimately that's the direction we went. We hope you love it as much as we love putting it together. Scott, any final thoughts?

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Well, I was gonna point out that uh I I'm still convinced that that's how Chris got back at me for having the wonderful idea of hey, let's see if we can convert these photos to a blueprint type thing. And I'll I that's what I said. And of course, Chris, usually when I say I have an idea, Chris grabs his wallet and yells, oh no, or something like that. But he he's made 99% of my goofy ideas come true. Uh, so I'm appreciative of that. He laughs at first, but then I think he takes it personal and makes it happen just to prove it can be done. So I'm I'm still convinced that this was payback for all those times, but it it worked, right? It it came together and everything like that. And you know, I like how we kept our over underlying theme of all our books, right? Yeah, they're conversation starters. So think of this book as a conversation starter, even with yourself, right? It's an appetizer, if you will. A client calls, asks you a question you don't know the answer to about who goes here. It's just a quick reference to get you started. That's why I say it's a conversation starter. And then, you know, you're off to the races, we've point you in the right direction, and you know, we we hope you find benefit to it. Like I said, I already have it. I helped write the darn thing.

SPEAKER_03 15:49

The Travel Advisors Cruise Line Handbook. And you notice we're keeping that theme going here now. We have a series of now three advisor handbook books. Uh, the first two are originally are also available. All of this on Amazon.com, or you can also go to AppleBooks. But the easiest way to get to all of that and the immediate links is to go to Tahandbook.com, which is our website. All three books are on there. You can order them, and and I suggest you get all three because they make a nice little set on the shelf. You know, they kind of book into each other. Uh, they're available now. The uh softcover is $19.99 for any of the books. The digital is $9.99. And if you would like a hardcover, you can get the first two books in hardcover for $24.99. I don't think we did a hardcover of the third book. Uh, honestly, I don't remember it's been such a whirl, but you can find the links for all the books on uh our website, tahandbook.com. And stay tuned because down the road, not too far, we will have another podcast because book four is coming soon.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Thanks for listening to Beyond the Handbook. Visit tahandbook.com to order our books. See our upcoming schedule of seminars at the team, and listen to episodes on demand. We'll see you next time when we go beyond the handbook.