A cruise influencer with more than 750,000 followers across her platforms said she has been inundated with enquiries after launching her own cruise booking agency.
Emma Le Teace, now known online as Emma Cruises, began her original blog ‘Cruising isn’t just for old people’ in 2016 and has built a large audience across YouTube and Facebook with cruise reviews, tips and advice.
She quit her full-time job in data development in 2021 to focus on content creation and launched her travel agency, The Cruise Globe off the back of her existing Cruise Globe free app, which allows its (more than 130,000) users to digitally map out their entire cruise history.
Immediately following the agency’s launch, she posted: “The number of quote requests we’ve received in the last 24 hours has been absolutely phenomenal and we are so grateful.
“I think if our team tries to work any faster, our fingers may catch on fire, which wouldn’t be good for anybody. My website has already gone down twice today!”
Speaking to Travel Gossip while onboard Royal Caribbean’s Legend of the Seas near France, she said the move into selling holidays was driven by years of hearing about poor customer experiences.
“I’ve been creating cruise content online for almost a decade now and almost every day of that I have seen comments from people in my audience who have had bad experiences on cruises or haven’t been able to find what they are looking for.
“I would say 80 to 90% of those could have been fixed if the person had a good travel agent and so I wanted to be able to confidently provide that.
“That isn’t easy of course, which is why I’ve waited almost a decade to launch The Cruise Globe agency.
“We’re focusing on fantastic human customer service as we believe that’s the foundation to any great company.”
The Cruise Globe is part of the Global Travel Collection – owned by Internova, which also owns Barrhead Travel – and is fully ATOL and ABTA bonded, with the relevant protections in the US.
Emma currently has 13 people on the team who, she said, have all ‘worked either at other cruise agencies in the past or directly for the cruise lines’.
“We have started by launching a team in the US and the UK and are always expanding by hiring the best in the business,” she said.
Emma said The Cruise Globe is already ‘the fastest growing cruise app in the world with over 150,000 members’, and she hopes to build it into ‘the fastest growing cruise agency, focusing on building what our audience want.’
She added the agency is already seeing bookings across a wide range of products.
“We’re booking all kinds of cruises. A lot of the cruises that my audience have seen me take in the past with mainstream cruise lines, but also luxury lines and river cruises.“
Emma said her existing audience has been key to the early success, and while she has recommended her followers book with a particular UK travel agent in the past, moving from content creation into selling holidays allows her to directly influence customer outcomes.
“I wasn’t ever able to give my audience the experience I wanted with just the recommendation of one agent but it was the best option I had at the time,” she said.
“The main difference from just recommending cruises to actually handling the bookings and customer expectations is that I can now help people avoid the problems that I see and I can guarantee that they get the price and service that I’ve always wanted for them.
“I create cruise content for people who have not necessarily been on a cruise and know that taking a cruise is a big commitment, not just in terms of money spent but also the time spent.
“Creating cruise content is the best way to give somebody a try-before-you-buy experience as much as possible, helping them to be confident in their choice.”
