Carnival Cruise Lines is the largest cruise company in North America and carries more than 60,000 passengers a week. The Carnival experience is the standard against what past cruisers judge their later cruise experiences. Carnival has captured the "fun" psychographic and has a strong reputation for an enjoyable, relaxed cruise. Furthermore, Carnival has a strong market expansion strategy for selling the mass-market cruise category and first-time cruisers. They have a clear vision and knowledge about the industry and a commitment to their brand essence, which is fun. Also, as an extension to their branding of the "fun" ships they are the low-price leaders. Because of their strong brand image they are able to achieve double-digit growth in …show more content…

The sales force now needs to focus on direct relationships so that they can collect data to analyze. The CRM system is useless if they don't have the customer information that goes into it. They should also look into how they could get the customer information that is being gathered by the travel agents sent back to them. Since such a large percentage of Carnival customers book through a travel agent it is important to have a way to collect that data.

After Carnival takes the above steps to prepare for CRM I think it would be a very useful tool to use to better understand who their customers are and market towards them. The main issue that Carnival has been dealing with is how to gain customer loyalty. CRM would allow them to personalize their marketing to the customer and hopefully win their repeat business. Also, CRM would help with cross selling. If they can go in and see that some customers are only going on Caribbean cruises they could try to sell them an Alaskan cruise.

Once they are ready to implement the CRM system there are some steps they should take in order for the integration to go as smoothly as possible.
1. Make collecting the customer information as easy as possible. Either by adding fields on line that the customer must fill out in order to book the cruise or by simply downloading the data from their sail and sign card.
2. Have a central location for all the data to be stored. Since they are going to