Melhus: private tours still integral

TOURSBYLOCALS Chief Executive Officer & Founder Paul Melhus (pictured) has told Cruise Weekly he believes the trend of lines instituting shoreside bubbles during port calls will not be sustainable.

Melhus said ToursByLocals was seeing customers booking further into the future than it had ever seen before, and as such, has extended its Find Your Cruise function’s calendar availability out from 13 to 24 months.

However, Melhus said the propensity for cruise lines to keep port calls as a sheltered, bubble-type experience would irk consumers.

“I think it’s going to be a problem for us short-term, but longer-term I don’t think it’ll be,” he said.

“The kind of tours we offer are private and our customers are not interested in going out with a group which is your typical shore excursion offering.

“[Cruise lines] will face too much negative pressure to maintain that because a lot of people just want to go and walk around in ports, they don’t want to go on an organised tour and be herded about.

“We perceive that as a real threat, but I don’t think it’s going to be something that will be sustainable over the long term.”

With ToursByLocals having recently extended its push in the Australian market through the appointment of a dedicated public relations agency for the first time in Gate 7, the tour operator has also set plans to engage the travel trade in the future, Melhus said.

“Right now most of our bookings in Australia are direct, a very small percentage are through travel agents, so we haven’t figured out the secret sauce to being successful with travel agents,” he said.

“It’s not enough to just give them a commission, you need to have a lot more face time with them, so we do have a plan to put more energy into developing the travel agent channel, but I think that’s going to be a future plan.”