Norwegian Cruise Line Launches New Trade Portal

Copenhagen, January 28 2021 – Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), the innovator in global cruise travel with a 54-year history of breaking boundaries, has successfully launched “Norwegian Central”, a new and exclusive trade portal aimed at helping travel agents learn, market and sell NCL holidays more easily and seamlessly. The initiative follows the recent introduction of the Company’s new fly-cruise booking platform NCL Air with both efforts designed to provide travel partners with the utmost support in the run-up to the line’s relaunch of cruise operations.

Under the four pillars "Info", "Marketing", "Book" and "Contact", travel agents can find the newly designed training platform NCL University (NCLU), the marketing portal Marketing Headquarters, allowing partners to easily download marketing materials and videos. Further, the new platform gives direct access to the booking engine Book Norwegian including the new booking platform NCL Air. The "Contact" section establishes a direct connection to the NCL sales team and provides information about events and webinars.

Book, learn, benefit
With Norwegian Central, travel agents can prepare even better for their direct contact with customers. For example, they receive an overview of all their customers' outstanding CruiseNext certificates so they can contact them specifically and speak to them personally. The same applies to all future cruise vouchers (FCCs) that customers have received from NCL for suspended cruises or cancellations as part of the Peace of Mind policy. At the same time, the platform enables direct access to NCL's booking engine “Book Norwegian”, where travel agents can create new bookings, access existing bookings and check in customers online. Integrated into this is the new booking platform NCL Air, which offers even more freedom and choice when booking fly-cruise packages. The newly revised online training program NCL University (NCLU) offers refreshed course content, new performance levels and a newly designed discount program with which agents can earn discounts of up to 30% on their private bookings by reaching the successive learning levels - which can be combined with current promotions. In addition, Norwegian Central links in the company’s marketing tool Marketing Headquarters, from which travel agents can download all marketing materials, toolkits for promotions, videos and much more.

New brochures, even more Europe
In the Marketing Headquarters, agents will find the new brochure with the global variety of routes 2021-2023, available for easy download and ideal for customers who would like to feel the fresh sea air again as soon as possible and who would like to plan ahead. In the coming years, NCL will be more present in Europe than ever before: a total of eight ships will be positioned in the region - the company's largest European offering to date. These include Baltic Sea departures from Copenhagen with calls to Stockholm and Oslo, cruises from / to Reykjavik and stops in Greenland for the first time in the summer of 2022. This November customers can enjoy new Canary Islands cruises from Lisbon and an even wider selection of Mediterranean cruises. To bring the new European program even more into focus, the new European brochure appears at the same time as the main brochure in a handy 20x20cm format and presents selected European highlights for 2021 to 2022 including exclusive destination tips that make you want to get to know Europe from a new perspective. The brochure can be ordered in a hard copy free of charge from infox.de. It also includes newly designed sales manual, in which travel agents can now find things like deck plans for all ships.

Direct line to NCL
The new trade platform also acts as a direct line to the NCL sales team, which keeps you up to date with all the latest news from NCL such as upcoming events and webinars here and in the Partners First Facebook group. “In line with our partners-first philosophy, our top priority this year was to give our travel agency partners the support they need. We will continue to strengthen this in the future. We're seeing great demand for NCL cruises, fortunately for this year as well, but also for 2022 and 2023. We want to equip the agents with the best possible tools to meet this demand even more easily and seamlessly. With Norwegian Central we have brought all of our most important tools together in one place and all with just one login, "says Kevin Bubolz, Managing Director Europe at NCL.

The all-new Norwegian Central is available on norwegiancentral.com. Agents can login with their Book Norwegian credentials or email agencysupport@ncl.com to register.