SINGAPORE-BASED Citystate Travel has acquired luxury cruise specialist, ACE Cruise Holidays, in an effort to boost the capability and market reach of its cruise division.
As of January 1, ACE Cruise Holidays’ director, Peter Wong, has joined the senior management team of Citystate Travel’s cruise division, bringing with him a seasoned cruise consultant.
Speaking to TTG Asia e-Daily in an interview, Citystate Travel executive director Albert Ho said both parties first mooted the idea of a collaboration about two years ago.
“Citystate Travel’s primary focus has been on selling regional sailings and has been named Royal Caribbean International’s top agent for years now. We feel that the cruise division could be made more complete by deepening its transaction in international cruises. And that is where Peter’s company comes in. ACE Cruise Holidays specialises in international cruises, especially those by luxury cruise lines, and he has vast experience in the cruise industry himself,” Ho said.
“There is no doubt that both companies are profitable and this merger serves to advance our cruise ambitions,” said Wong, who founded ACE Cruise Holidays four years ago and is among Royal Caribbean International’s top three agents for the past three years.
Explaining Wong’s new role at Citystate Travel, Ho said Wong would lend his expertise in identifying high-end cruise products that would appeal to local and regional travellers, and roll out “new activities to reach out to premium travellers with the additional resources we now have”.
This includes advertising in periodicals to “educate the market on the vast variety of cruise products available”.
Wong is also tasked with fine-tuning Citystate Travel’s CRM programme – either by employing a third-party system or by developing its own – and will train the company’s next generation of staff in handling well-travelled, high-end clients.
“While we are strong here in Singapore, we are still in the infancy stage when it comes to Asian business and we do want to grow our bookings from other markets in the region. So, Peter will also spearhead our expansion in Asia this year,” said Ho, who would only reveal that his first office outside of Singapore would be located in a populous city in South-east Asia.
Ho expects the merger to grow passenger volume by 10 per cent to 20,000 passengers by end-2014, and bring about average annual growth of eight per cent over the next five years.
