Price-drop alert website Cruise Fare Monitor courting agents

A year-old website that monitors when prices drop on a cruise and sends consumers an email alert is branching out to include travel agents in its business model.

The mission of the site, Cruise Fare Monitor, is to save cruisers money when the price of their cruise falls after booking.

The service charges a fee of $10 to $15 per booking, which co-founder Jay Olshansky said can easily be recouped from fare savings. He said hundreds of customers have signed up to use the service and that nearly 80% have received at least one fare-drop alert.

“We did a lot of research to discover how often the cruise fare actually declines and discovered that it’s enormous,” Olshansky said. “It’s billions of dollars that could be potentially saved by the public.”

He cited the extreme example of a Carnival Cruise Lines voyage booked by one customer that triggered at least a dozen alerts. “Every week they were dropping the cost of the cruise by $100 here, $50 there,” he said.

Carnival, Royal Caribbean International and Norwegian Cruise Line are among the lines he monitors, though he does not keep watch over Princess Cruises or Holland America Line. Olshansky said he’s not yet satisfied with the quality of data for those brands.

There are several monitoring options. The basic service, which costs $10, offers alerts from sign-up through final payment whenever the price on your cabin falls below what was originally paid.

A $12 option extends the service until the sailing date. Olshansky said that while fares can’t be reduced, cruise lines will often offer category upgrades or onboard spending credits if fares drop after final payment.

A third, $15 option adds monitoring for when a higher cabin category becomes available at a price that is the same as or lower than the one booked.

“It happens all the time,” he said. “And no one would ever know about it unless you have an automated program that checks your fare against all other higher cabin categories for the same family.“

For travel agents, Olshansky is offering the $15 service for $10. There is a $179 set-up fee and “nominal” annual fee, as well. For that, an agency gets monitoring of all of its clients’ bookings in one place.

“If an agency has 100 agents, they would be able to automate the process of monitoring across all the cruise lines,” Olshansky said. “It’s very time-consuming to do it manually, but if you have a computer program that does it automatically for you 24/7, it just saves an enormous amount of time.”

Lower fare, lower commission

Of course, when agents rebook a cruise at a lower fare, it also means a lower commission, which reduces the appeal of Fare Drop Monitor to agents. Olshansky acknowledged that but said it has potential to build client loyalty.

“Travel agents love to save their clients money,” he said.

He is also suggesting that agents pass on the cost to clients. “If they wanted to charge a little more than $10, they could and make a small profit out of that,” he said.

Stephanie Turner, president of Brentwood Travel near St. Louis, said she wasn’t sure she would try the idea, but if she did she would definitely pass along the cost.

“I could see doing that,” she said. “I would not pay for it as an agency direct.”

Turner said she was unaware of any cruise lines that protect agent commissions when fares drop, though “they used to.”

At least two other services offer fare monitoring. The consumer site Cruise Critic calls its free service Price Drop. It sends out alerts weekly.

Another service, CruiseFish.net, charges 99 cents per booking. It also earns revenue from ads placed on its website.

CruiseFish has been in business since 2010 and is operated by Quebec City businessman Phillipe Besson, who said he started it after noticing how cruise prices varied wildly before sail date.

“The fact that cruise lines [mostly] honor price drops on booked cruises made a monitoring service clearly necessary,” he said.