We Must Be Onto Something…
My husband and I had dinner recently with a friend of his from the golf business and the golfer’s wife. It seems my hubby spent half the day on the course telling the golfer all about CharterWave and my new book about cruising vacations, and so when I joined the group for dinner later in the day, I felt it only appropriate to offer a signed copy as a gift. The golfer looked it up and down, then quickly handed it over to his wife.
She looked at the book’s cover, whose title asks, “Why book a cabin? Have the Whole Boat.” Then she read the book’s back-cover copy, which explains that readers probably have never heard of charter because travel agents make such good money pushing cruise-ship cabins instead. Reputable charter brokers, not travel agents, are the key to finding the cruising vacation of your dreams.
This is when my brain wires fired and pulled out the long-forgotten information that the golfer’s wife is a travel agent. I suppose the memory was triggered by the look of mild indignation on her face.
I’m sure you can imagine the look of utter discomfort that crossed mine. We hadn’t even ordered the hors d’oeuvres yet.
A lovely dinner followed, but only after a few minutes of her explaining how cruise ships are wonderful places, which she said she knew because they gave her so many free trips. She even started to explain how she thought they were better than private yachts, right up until I asked her if she’d ever been onboard one. (Of course not. No freebie junket had been offered to her.)
She also made clear that she, too, can book yacht charters–by picking up the phone and calling a charter broker on behalf of her clients. Why, I asked myself, would anybody want to put such a clueless middleman between themselves and the person who is actually coordinating their cruising vacation?
As you might imagine, this conversation was not going to end well, so the two of us eventually changed the subject by listening to our golfer husbands recount the minute details of every last hole they’d played on the course that day.
But the point had been made, and it just may be the sharp one to the heart that the mammoth, collusive cruise-ship-travel-agency beast has needed for some time.
You really can Have the Whole Boat. You just have to leave your travel agent behind and learn the basics of a better cruising vacation by joining the CharterWave community.