Travel Cue – Specialist on Worldwide Marine Fares
At Travel Cue, our passionate, experienced and knowledgeable people, who inherently understand the nature of your business, and are available round the clock to assist and provide valuable solutions at short notice. Our state of the art technology platform not only unifies our communication and service delivery but also enhances our capability in procuring marine discounted fares, both on economy and business, from a spread of airline offers across their network.
This level of delivery is especially crucial considering the ever increasing need for owners and yacht managers to control costs, the expense of crew travel to and from the work place continues to be of significant importance. The number of transactions that such travel generates on an ongoing basis has the potential for costs to spiral out of control due to the lack of understanding on specialist marine fares.
With the current market situation in the marine and yachting industry, it has become of significant importance for owners and yacht managers to optimise cost savings, reducing all possible costs including the high expense of crew travel to and from the ship/yacht.
With a growing number of different airline types (scheduled and low cost carriers), and a confusing plethora of fares to choose from, it is little wonder that people question whether they are being quoted the best relevant price for their crew travel, as perceptions exist there is always a cheaper price elsewhere or on the web.
Due to globalisation and rapid development of technology, we can now find multi-distribution channels with various fare options available to select from scheduled and low cost carriers. These different fare mechanisms introduced by Airlines, has caused doubt in travel agent’s capability of sourcing the lowest fare when basically just anyone now can go online through these channels and obtain a low fare without having to go through a third party that will result in additional cost.
Major scheduled carriers have historically offered discounted fares for mariners when they flew on their respective country’s merchant tonnage. Given the travel pattern of joining and off signing vessels in different locations, these ‘marine’ or ‘seaman’ fares were designed for one-way travel with flexible condition on changes and refunds along with additional baggage allowance. Eligibility covered personnel travelling to/from a vessel either with a ‘seaman’s’ book or specific documentation indicating the nature & purpose of travel i.e. joining a vessel or disembarking from a vessel.
Given yacht crew tend to fly from their home base to a port, then embark and fly back from a different location, the use of marine fares tend to be perfectly logical and cost-effective for yacht travel. The convenience is further enhanced when seen along with the fact that such travel is often subjected to changes due to the inherent nature of the yachts movements.
Worth pointing out that online fares are not intended or designed for crew travel even though they do offer as an alternative where such travel is within confines of a specific area or where the convenience and cost is far overriding in nature. For international travel such fares can also be fairly attractive albeit they come with higher restrictions on conditions such as “change fees”, “refund penalties” etc. The offers are seasonal and are not consistent across the year.
The nature of mobility across time zones and the complicated travel patterns warrant a specialist travel that not only focusses on crew travel, but has the expertise, network, systems, operational and access to global specialist fare pricing to support your needs on a 24x7 basis.
We at Travel Cue stay connected throughout your journey via unique bespoke eco-system involving people, technology and core to it all our constant enhancement of service towards defining the overall travel experience.
Connect with us at yachttravel@connectcue.com and our customer care team : Vanessa Kiley & Nikitia Hanna will be there to discuss further.
By Travel Cue