As part of its ongoing commitment to Partnership 2.0, Norwegian Cruise Line today announced it is re-aligning its North American sales team to provide enhanced and more effective customer service to its travel partners. Reporting to Andy Stuart, executive vice president, global sales and passenger services, this newly structured sales force is led by Camille Olivere, vice president of sales, and includes four key areas of focus, headed by experienced sales directors who report to Olivere. In addition, the enhancement includes the creation of a new inside sales team that will work in conjunction with the realigned field sales team, along with a new automated customer relationship management database.

Also reporting to Stuart, Patrick Mitchell, vice president of global sales strategy and planning, will be adding resources to augment his focus on growing the company’s charter, corporate meeting and incentive business (CM&I), which will continue to be led by Brandon Townsley, who has been with Norwegian since 1999.

“As part of Partnership 2.0, we wanted to ensure that our sales team was optimizing its resources to effectively support the travel partner channel and to work closely with them to not only service, but grow, their business with us,” said Stuart. “We took a very thoughtful and strategic approach to this realignment, incorporating feedback from a travel partner survey we conducted which asked them to rank the level of importance of attributes influencing their travel recommendations to their own customer base.”

The new sales structure is comprised of the following key areas:

• Online Travel Accounts (OTA) led by Alex Pinelo with 25 years experience in the cruise industry, primarily with Norwegian.
• Strategic Accounts led by Joe Jiffo with Norwegian since 2000 and has more than 28 years experience in the travel industry.
• Industry Relations led by Clark Reber who has been with Norwegian since 1996 and has 19 years experience in the travel industry.
• Field & Inside Sales, Home-Based and Consortia led by Wayne Peyreau, with Norwegian for the past 11 years and the industry for 27 years.

The newly-created inside sales team, reporting to Peyreau and based in the company’s Miami headquarters, will provide more frequent and consistent points of contact with travel partners, improving the company’s ability to help travel partners understand and sell the unique value proposition offered with Norwegian’s Freestyle Cruising.

“The goal with this realignment is to optimize our resources and be smarter about how we reach and service our travel partners,” said Olivere. “We have just 10 percent of the industry’s capacity, but we have the challenge of having the same size customer base as the rest of the industry, so our resources really needed to be maximized for high performance.”

Norwegian has also launched a new automated customer relationship management (CRM) system that is integrated with the line’s reservation system. This new system provides the sales team with improved information to work more effectively and efficiently with travel partners. It also provides the ability to identify customer trade preferences for promotional opportunities, among many other benefits.