In last month’s #STCTalks webinar, Keeping Up with the Cruisers: Entertaining Community Engagement, we heard from Anthony Richards (EFFY Jewelry) and Abe Hughes (Royal Caribbean International) as they shared some valuable tips and tricks to maintain engagement with the cruise community.
So how can you best engage with crew members, guests, and partners? Here’s a rundown of what we learned.
The Cruise Community, Broken Down
- Engagement – A sense of belonging to a group or being connected to like-minded people.
- Community – The sense of fellowship with others resulting from sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals, as mentioned by the innate feeling and desire to be engaged and connected to others.
- Cruising – To sail about, touching a series of ports.
“When you put all these together, the different entities of a cruise community have formed, and remain connected around the passion for cruising as a whole.” – Anthony Richards, Associate Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition, EFFY Jewelry
Communication Is Key
We’re no longer in that same office together. How do we better get the information out? One way Royal Caribbean did this was through “The Daily,” an email blast including all the high-level information of what’s going on throughout the company, throughout the entire Royal Caribbean Group.
“In a way, I feel even more connected now to our company than I had in the past because now we have town halls directly with Richard Fain, our chairman and CEO, along with the entire executive leadership team. Michael Bailey himself does these Royal Caribbean leadership chats where he engages every employee who’s out there, answers the questions firsthand, and keeps everybody up to date.” – Abe Hughes, Strategic Account Manager, Royal Caribbean International
Utilizing Social Platforms
“I came up with the idea of creating a social media platform that I now call “The Crew Area.” A few of the things we do are a crew interview series, crew trivia, questions of the day. The whole intention is to keep this crew community around the world informed, engaged, but do so in a fun way that we can, you know, enjoy what we’re bringing to people.” – Anthony Richards, Associate Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition, EFFY Jewelry
