Understanding a Ship's Capacity

A ship's capacity might seem simple, but it can be confusing for advisors and clients alike. Chris has an example of how not understanding this concept created chaos for a cruise group and how you as an advisor can avoid this mistake while helping your clients understand it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

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 Counselor, Michael Lakana, and Chris Grump, Elite Cruise Counselor Scott McAllister, and accredited cruise counselor Danielle Gognier. It's time to go beyond the handbook.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

And you got Chris flying solo one more time as my fellow authors enjoy a little summertime off here, but we wanted to keep the podcast going. And I saw something the other day in one of those agent Facebook groups that I thought would be worth addressing here on the podcast. And it's worth addressing for two reasons. It's a mistake that we sometimes see advisors make, but it's also something that is sometimes difficult for the customer to understand. And that is when ships get to capacity. And let me kind of set the stage for what happened and what I saw as far as the post goes. So I was in one of the cruise line groups that agents have, you know, agents helping agents as far as I'm not going to name the brand, but you know, the different cruise lines. And there was a post in there where this person said, I have a group of, I think it was like 30 cabins going, and it was for a graduation celebration. And they talked about how they had booked um a couple of rooms that um held like four people, and they only had two names on those rooms. And they were holding off on, for whatever reason, putting the graduates' names in those rooms. And they waited until the last minute, and now the ship is at capacity. And even though the rooms have the space for them, they couldn't add them. And they were beside themselves wondering, okay, why can't I add these people? There's a bed in there for them. Why can't I use it? And it's a question that we see fairly regularly, and it confuses both advisors and the traveling public sometimes. So for those of you that have not encountered this, it is worth addressing. So I had a similar experience with this one time. Uh I was booking trying to book two suites in the same category on a specific cruise line. And when I went in and put in the first booking, I could see that there were three different suites available to choose from. I reserved that room, and when I went back to do another one, the category was sold out. And it took me a minute, and then I canceled the first booking and went, okay, maybe something happened. Well, there's the three rooms again. But when I made that first booking, the other two disappeared. So why is that happening? So there's a couple of reasons why these things can happen. One of them is the ship reaches capacity. Now you might say to yourself, okay, well, wait a minute. The ship has room for four here. Why can't I only put two in that room? That's not the capacity. Well, that's true. A ship has two different capacities when you talk about uh how many people you can put on a ship. The first one that we usually talk about is rooms being sold out, and that's double occupancy. So let's just say a ship has oh, let's just say a thousand state rooms to make it easy. So a thousand state rooms, and if they fill all 1,000 state rooms, the ship is technically sold out, right? Because you can't buy another state room. But we may not have filled all the spots in those rooms. And I had a situation happen like that. I sailed a Panama Canal cruise where the ship was sold out room-wise, but since we were sailing in October, they the third and the fourth berths, a lot of them were empty. So we were sold out room-wise, but we weren't sold out to capacity. That makes sense. That's why sometimes you'll see two different numbers when you look up a ship's capacity, and one of them will be the double occupancy, say 3,000, and then the one at full capacity might be 3,800 or 4,000, right? Well, even with that higher number, sometimes you can't fill every single berth. And this comes down to the lifeboats. The computers nowadays are really smart, as we all know, sometimes too smart, but they keep track of each zone where the lifeboats are. And if you go over capacity with a lifeboat, it freezes those rooms. So in other words, you might have a room that holds four, but you can only put two in there because you only have two slots left within the lifeboats. And they are very, very careful about how that works. So that is one possibility as to why you might not be able to put more people into that room. Another reason that rooms can disappear, like I mentioned with my booking, is that they're holding back space for the guarantees or for group space. And so sometimes what will happen is you'll go into your booking system and you'll see that only one room is left in a particular category, but you can still book it as a guarantee. Or the guarantee might even be turned off and you can only book one room in that, even though you know you can see three of them. And the reason for that is they are holding back some rooms because you may have a group that needs space and they have a certain number of rooms on hold, or it could also be a capacity issue, or it could be that they're hedging their bets for the guarantees. And for those of you that are new to the industry and don't know what a guarantee is, it's basically a way to book a room at a lower cost, but you don't pick the room location, the cruise line does. And in order to do that, they have to have a room to pick. And so they're hedging their bets that they'll be able to give a lower category room. So, for example, in an interior, they would be able to give people the cheapest room. Sometimes, though, if nobody cancels and they don't have that room, they've got to find another room in a higher category. So it's one of those games where the cruise lines have to constantly be thinking about their inventory. Do we have enough rooms for everybody? Are we holding enough rooms back for the groups, for the guarantees, and all that kind of stuff? And it's one of those jigsaw puzzles that I'm glad I don't have to deal with on a regular basis. And every once in a while you do see where they go over capacity, and then they start asking for people, and they'll say, listen, you know, if you're willing to give up your spot on this cruise, we'll refund your money and we'll give you a 100% credit on a future voyage. Uh, because every once in a while the system doesn't work as it's designed, and they have to, they have to figure out a way to pivot. And guarantee you, there's always somebody that will take that deal. You know, they live five minutes from the pier and they go, hey, listen, bumping this two weeks down the road and getting it for free, I'll take that any day. But those are the reasons why a ship could fill up and get to capacity. Now, my question to this group would have been, why did if the graduates were the focus of this cruise, why were they not the first two people booked? But also, there's ways that you could have gotten around this. You could have talked to the cruise line and said, Would you allow us to put a TBA name in here? So we are holding that space and then we change the name later. Sometimes they will allow that, sometimes they won't, but you might also be able to do a name change. There are some cruise lines out there that will allow you to do name changes at will, and then there's some of them that will allow you to do a name change as long as you keep one original person on the reservation. So, what you could have done in that situation, let's say you need four spots in the room and you know you can change all but one of them, you make that first guest, whoever you know is going, and then put three random people in there. And if you need to change them out, you can. The bottom line is there's ways to solve this problem ahead of time without it becoming an issue a few weeks before travel, which is what happened with this particular post that I saw. Now, as far as dealing with the clients, one of the things you want to think about, and this is something we preach constantly in our seminars and in our books, you always want to over-explain rather than underexplain to a customer. So in a situation like this, what I would have told the customer is I would have said, we really want to book these graduates now. We don't want to wait until later because we could reach capacity. And I'm sure you've had this happen as well. If you book cruises, the customer will say to you, Well, how much time do I have if I want to add a third guest or want to do this or want to do that? My answer is always the same. Sooner rather than later, and you could get to a point where the ship hits capacity and we can't add them. And then the other thing to think about, and and most travel advisors know this, but if you're new to the industry, this might help. You know, not every room holds the same amount of people. You and some cruise lines won't let you book a four-person room for only two people. They're gonna make you put two people in a two-person room, three and a three, and so on. Uh, some luxury lines and some higher price lines don't care. They'll let you pick a room with whatever capacity you want. Uh, but the public sometimes has a difficulty understanding this, especially people that are new to cruise. They assume it's like a hotel room. And we've all seen hotel rooms where, you know, it's supposed to be only two people, but six people stay in there, and it's as long as the hotel doesn't know and they don't make a lot of noise, nobody really cares. They kind of turn the other way. Cruises don't work like that. But the general public, especially those, like I said, who have never cruised before, they may not understand that concept. They simply think, well, if we can pay the fare, we can all stay in this room. And it doesn't work that way. And that's even before we talk about if there are miners involved. There may be specific rules on that cruise line about the miners can only be one door down from the parents or can only be in a room across the hall, or they have to be connecting. Each line has its own rules. And this is why it's so important for you as an advisor to understand those rules when you're selling to your customers, but also make sure your customer understands those rules. And that's why it might be important if a customer has questions about what is the policy for miners or what is the policy for adding people later, you may be wise to send them an email that then allows you to show that this was documented. And in that email, explain that policy to them or link to it on the cruise line website. And that way they can't come back later and say, Well, I didn't know about that, or you didn't tell me about that, because you certainly don't want to be these poor folks that waited at the last minute to add the guests of honor, and now they're doing a sailing with 30 rooms, and the guest of honor won't even be there.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

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