After a fresh recruitment drive, the line will this year pour resources into a tailored fam programme, creating new training materials and providing more targeted trade sales support.

Resilient Lady will debut in May, followed by Brilliant Lady later this year – and Riley insists agents will be key to their success.

In fact, he wants to get as many agents onboard as possible. But this is Virgin Voyages, after all. There’s a way.

Instead of a typical series of educationals, the brand will offer four separate fam events, each tailored to specific trade audiences.

"The first will be for top sellers of other brands who we want to experience Virgin Voyages first-hand," explains Riley, the line’s vice-president of international sales.

The second, he adds, will be for agents already selling Virgin Voyages but are yet to experience the product.

A third will be designed for Virgin’s key accounts, and a fourth for marketing teams within agency groups and consortia. "We can tailor the content and the approach of the trips to individual group needs," Riley says. 

The tailored fam programme is one of several trade enhancements made possible by several new additions to Virgin Voyages’ global team, including Princess Cruises’ European sales manager Matt Lebbern and Princess sales operations manager Mark Lowman, as well as Iglu’s Beth Hewlett.

Trade commitment

"The purpose of the recruitment was to build much deeper relationships with our first mates [travel agents]. With a smaller team, we were not able to be as deeply rooted in an account and understand a business to the extent that we wanted to," Riley explains.

"We’ve been committed to the trade throughout the pandemic, and we will continue to support, grow and expand our agent community. This was the next phase of our expansion, looking towards consistent growth in 2023 and 2024."

Riley is also keen to reach out to agents who haven’t previously considered selling cruise. "They’ve got clients looking for premium accommodation, which is what we offer," Riley reasons.

"They’re looking for a more relaxed, luxury environment, and we’re all ears for new opportunities. Some of those new roles we’ve brought into the team are purposely designed to seek out these new opportunities."

A key motivator for Riley and his team is bringing new agents into the cruise industry. "That’s always been a part of our DNA," he says.

A recent survey by the line established around 70% of its agent partners are homeworkers. "We have to work differently. That’s not to say we won’t continue supporting retail partners – we will, and we do… we have people on the road to do that."

He continues: "We need to find a way to be more appealing to the people who are running their own businesses and have their own challenges."

The new-look Virgin team, Riley says, will strive to help agents "work smarter, not harder". Key to this will be new ready-made marketing options and tailor-made social media packs.

"We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for them to essentially ‘plug and play’ and drive Virgin Voyages without too much heavy lifting," he explains.

Exploring the options

The line will also provide additional information to the trade on its target demographic. "We have a sweet spot around 45 years old, so that 30 to 60 bracket is definitely where the majority of our sailors are," Riley says.

"We want to make sure the industry is aware there is a younger demographic, but it’s not as young as some people might have thought originally."

Beyond 2023, Riley stresses Virgin Voyages will retain its focus on "maximising yield and revenue" with its ship deployment.

And although the Mediterranean will continue to feature heavily next year for the brand, Riley believes the UK market should pay close attention to some of its further-flung itineraries.

"We’ve got repositioning cruises from Europe down to Australia, and we’ve got some amazing Australia and New Zealand itineraries as well," he adds.

"Quite often, those longer itineraries can be overlooked, so we’ll spend a lot of time focusing on the right partners that can sell that long-haul product."