NEWS SPECIAL REPORT
Meet the Queen C
unard will welcome 500 travel agents on board new ship Queen Anne within
the first month of its launch. Queen Anne is scheduled to
enter service on May 3, 2024, with a maiden voyage from Southampton to Lisbon. It will be the line’s first new ship in 14 years and the first time it has had a four-ship fleet since 1999. Angus Struthers, Cunard global
marketing and EMEA sales vice- president, said agents will be “critical” to the ship’s success, which will increase the line’s capacity by 44%. Speaking to Travel Weekly at a
shipyard visit for agents and the media at Fincantieri’s Marghera shipyard, Struthers said: “We’ve got a lot of work to do to ensure our agent partners are educated on Queen Anne, and although we have been putting a lot of time and effort into providing information and offering incentives on Shine Rewards Club, we won’t rest on our laurels. “Queen Anne represents a huge capacity increase for us so every
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channel is important to ensure we fill that space, but agents are especially critical. We want to get as many as possible on board in the first month so they can understand the product and see how different it is to the other ships in our fleet.”
Six months to go Queen Anne will be one of six ships offering visits during next year’s Clia Conference, which will give 200 agents the opportunity to take a tour. Cunard will invite a further 300 for “overnight experiences”. Cunard president Katie McAlister
said: “For more than 180 years, Cunard has constantly refined the definitive experience of luxury ocean travel and I am incredibly excited that we are now just six months away from beginning the next chapter of our remarkable story. “I know that guests around
the world are looking forward to sailing with our new Queen and we are counting down the days until we can welcome them aboard.”
AGENTS’ VIEWS
Emily Emmanuel, Hays Travel “I desperately wanted to win a
place on the visit because I thought it would be an amazing experience to see the new ship before anyone else steps on board. I was totally right — it was fantastic and I loved it. I have learnt so much being on the trip and the more I have learnt about Cunard, the more confident I am to go away and sell Queen Anne and all the other Queens in the fleet.”
Sarah Bolton, Travel Counsellors “I have been selling cruise for 30 years
but I had never visited a shipyard. So when the opportunity came up to go on Queen Anne, I was absolutely
thrilled. From the stage of the build she is at, you can really see how all the spaces are going to come together and what the flow is going to be. You can also tell how different she will be from the other Cunard ships, which is really exciting.”
Jacqui Bunn, Barrhead Travel “It has been a privilege to visit
Queen Anne at this stage in her build and I found the whole experience quite emotional. There are elements of the ship that are quite far along in the building process and others where it is just a skeleton, so it has been fascinating. I don’t know what I was expecting to see before I arrived, but it was so different and totally surpassed my expectations. I loved it.”
Queen Anne will be Cunard’s first new ship in 14 years. Josie Klein reports from its Italian shipyard
travelweekly.co.uk
PICTURE: Christopher Ison Photography
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