Sunday, March 12, 2017
Preliminary Results From Travel Score Tabulation.
March 12th, 2017.
Today is Day Six for the Society. It started on March 6th with a Facebook page, and quickly moved to Twitter, first with @CrusingSociety, then with @YourTravelScore. You can also visit the web sites at: www.CruisingSociety.org
Lots of very interesting replies in the first wave of 12 Travel Score applications that arrived yesterday and today.
Two have circumnavigated once, and two have gone around the world twice for a total of six round trips—one of double-dippers was me—I’ve done so twice in the same direction as Phileas Fogg -- flying east.
The 12 members had clocked up 460 cruise night. One comment about Viking River Cruises: "Plus, 1t's 150 or so passengers not 1,500 or 15,000, so you feel like a person, not a number" indicates how eager people are to share their cruising and riverboating experiences.
The average person has visited 22 countries.
Wow, and they have flown 4,200,000 miles and most have gold and platinum air cards. That means they are current status members, for airline cards de-escalate in value if not used, unlike cruise status programs that typically just keep rolling forward.
You know that distinction between how most air and hotel loyalty programs don't offer grandfather status, while the cruise lines do keep growing.
This whole idea of the Cruise Society was sparked just 6 days ago when I learned about the Loyalty Status Match offer from MSC Cruises!
See it here: https://www.msccruisesusa.com/en-us/MSC-Voyagers-Club/Loyalty-Match-Program.aspx
This trend of status matching is growing. There is even a web site called http://www.statusmatcher.com/ where people share their war stories, for the big corporate players don't want to let the cat out of the bag that they are doing deals to poach each other's high value loyal status customers.
But MSC cruises has fired the first public salvo, across the bows of the other cruise lines, and publicly doing deals. They even have a straight forward process all online. See how easy it is at the link above.
The last question I asked on the survey was if they had an AMEX Gold Card or a Chase Sapphire? ...and if they didn't would they want to hear about it?
We call it the "Gold Card Curious" question. And of the 12 replies one respondent said he didn't have a top line card but is interested, and he's a guy who cruises, 100 plus cruise nights and didn't have an airline status card.
American Express and Chase Bank are you listening?
Mitchell P. Davis CEO, Cruising Society and the Travel Score system.