2011 Cruise – Letter from the President
March 9th, 2010
Now that you haven’t heard from us in a week, we are once again back in your mailbox. We recommend that you go to our website www.facug.org and watch a replay of the sail-away that you may have missed live. You can also get to see parts of some of the presentations that were videoed and relive some of the excitement of the weekend. You may want to listen to a recording of Carey Holzman’s radio show last Tuesday (March 2) evening, where Sam Wexler and Stu Silverman were interviewed by Carey and his partner Craig Crossman. You can view lots of photos of the Conference at www.flickr.com/facug2010. If you have photos to add, just upload them to this site.
We know that you had a wonderful experience at FACUG’s Technology Conference@Sea. How do we know? You told us. Your overwhelmingly positive replies to our survey convey to us all that we did right as well as something’s that you feel could be improved to make your experience even better. Many of you who never cruised before were quite leery. We had emails indicating that many expected to pay for lots of additional things but have had an eye-opening experience. That was only the beginning; next year’s ship will provide even more amenities.
We have given you a weekend to remember. Now, we need your help. The way the cruise industry works is different than one might expect. If you or I were in a business that depended upon thousands of people needing to buy your service each and every week and someone came along that indicated that they could supply at least 300 such people then they would certainly gain your attention. Not so, as all of you have heard, we are looking to have a bigger and more exciting Conference next year; however, in order to do that we need to prove to Royal Caribbean Cruise Line that we are the real deal. We need 100 reservations by the end of this month or we will not be able to have the required meeting rooms or guarantee the price. We found out this year that the most difficult part of the deal was not the price, but rather them allocating the meeting rooms to us and thus denying the rest of their passengers’ use of them. On this past cruise, there were some who held out with the belief that the costs would decline. That did not happen. The costs kept rising. We believe the same will hold true for next year.
One other aspect of next year’s cruise that is significant at this time. Your $100 deposit is needed this month, but is 100% refundable until 90 days prior to sailing as opposed to this year whereby the travel agent assessed a $50 per cabin administration fee. There is absolutely no risk. Last year, even without our having had the opportunity to prove what we could provide the type of experience you had and given the fact that we could lose money if we changed our mind, we had about 75 deposits within a week. That is not happening this time. We know the location is different. We know that it is a day longer and that it will be somewhat more costly for a significantly better rated ship and we also know that we have ideas that will make next year’s experience even better. As we said before, there is 0.0 chance of risk. If you change your mind 30, 60 or 90 days after this month then you will receive a full refund. Please go to www.facug.org and make your reservation now.
Sam Wexler
