Here’s an excerpt from a fascinating interview by Carnival’s recently re-hired Bob Dickinson. I’ve always enjoyed listening to what he has to say.
Q: What will you be doing for Carnival?
A: I’m going to look at the North American brands and basically conduct research as to the brand deficiencies, opportunities and strengths. Obviously I’ll do some research on what our friendly competitors are doing well or not doing well. Then we want to develop a gap analysis to see where we can get best practices among the brands, where some brands may have opportunities for improvement and then develop strategies to enhance relations with travel agents. We want to have as robust as possible relations with agents among the various brands.
So by friendly competitors, to me, that means industry giant Carnival will be comparing themselves to the likes of MSC, NCL (and of course Royal.) Interesting move as traditionally the industry leaders don’t really care what the little guys are doing.