Odysia Cruise, which sits alongside Chesterfield-based agency Bolsover Cruise Club, soft launched in October last year and within a few days had received its first booking on 20 October.
A customer booked a 14-night sailing on P&O Cruises' Ventura ship departing in September 2026.
Business development manager Oliver Wilson, son of Michael Wilson, managing director of Bolsover Cruise Club, has worked on the new Odysia brand for just over a year.
Speaking exclusively to TTG, Wilson said between five to 10 staff members have transferred across from Bolsover's existing workforce to help him build the Odysia Cruise brand and its odysiacruise.com website.
Wilson said: "My family has a travel agency that serves a very traditional customer, an older demographic who prefer longer, higher value holidays.
"They value handholding and phone-based relationships. But there's a new generation out there, and they don't want that. They have different expectations and have different behaviours. They don't want to go on the phone and have multiple phone calls back and forth.
"They're looking at video content online, avoiding phone calls and using AI."
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Odysia has accounts on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. However, its first booking came before the brand had officially launched any of its pages.
Wilson added: "We want to make sure we're ahead on the social media front. We want to have platforms with lots of engaging content and we're industry-leading with that content. We want people to trust what we say.
"We want people to trust us because we're telling them the facts, but we don't sugarcoat everything."
He continued: "The strategic goal [with Odysia] really is to future proof the [Bolsover Cruise Club] business to be ready for the next wave of cruise customers."
'Completely separate businesses'
Odysia will also try and bring back customers who had a bad cruising experience previously.
"We want to actually make people enjoy cruising and trust us so they come back and think 'well, Odysia look after me. They they don't want to just sell me something just to get my money'," Wilson explained.
Wilson stressed that the Bolsover Cruise Club and Odysia Cruise brands are "completely separate". "We don't want people to associate them together," he added. "We want them to be for different people. Bolsover is for a completely different customer to what we're trying to get at Odysia."
In recent years, a handful of agency brands where customers don't have to speak to a human when confirming a booking have launched, including Seascanner and app-based agency My Kind of Cruise.
When asked how his sister and chief operations officer Katie Wilson and his dad Michael have helped with Odysia's launch six months ago, Wilson said: "We wouldn't be where we are today without my sister and dad because they've got so much knowledge and they're so switched on with things.
"I wouldn't be here without them either. Katie does an excellent job. If I can be anything like her I'll be a winner."
