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Costa Reduces North American Staff in Major Restructuring
Costa Cruises has unveiled a major restructuring of its North American operations in a move that will downsize its staff here and significantly refocus its sales strategy. Maurice Zarmati, president-North America for Costa, said the line has reduced its staff in Miami from 120 to 40, with reductions across the board in sales, marketing, guest services and reservations.
The move is in line with Costa’s plan to homeport only one vessel, Costa Atlantica, out of Miami sailing seven-day Caribbean itineraries starting next January, compared to the two ships – Altantica and Fortuna it has sailing out of Fort Lauderdale this winter season. Costa will also focus on selling those Caribbean sailings to the Europe market, according to Zarmati. “Costa’s thinking is, let’s import from Europe where we can get higher yield and concentrate on other global destinations,” he said. “We want to basically focus on Mediterranean business from North America. We also have adopted a new positioning for Costa as the preferred cruise line for North Americans traveling to Europe….we want to focus all of our resources on that.”
Zarmati said Costa also will refocus its travel agent marketing strategy on a selected group of preferred partners and those agents who want to be preferred with the line. He said currently there are about 500 agencies in North America that are big sellers of Costa’s cruise products. With that refocused strategy, Costa is reducing its sales and marketing organization in the U.S. to roughly 10 people, down from 27. Scott Knudsen continues as vice president-sales, but Linda Parrotta is leaving the company as vice president of marketing. Marketing will now be overseen by Wendy Mannix, director of marketing. Veteran Costa sales executives Bill Dwyer and Carmen Corvos also remain.
Costa also is reducing the size of other departments in reservations, guest services, accounting and passenger traffic. Ruben Perez remains as senior vice president of guest services. “We went into each area and crafted a new number understanding we’re not focused on selling Caribbean business anymore,” Zarmati said.
Those reductions were announced to the staff late last week and Zarmati said Costa is arranging severance packages and outplacement, and trying to find positions with Costa’s sister companies within Carnival Corp. for the staff whose positions have been eliminated.
Zarmati also has been explaining the new strategy to Costa’s top travel agent partners. He said any reduction in staff will not result in a reduction in service in the U.S., since Costa’s staff in Genoa will pick up any shortfall. But he insisted that Costa will remain completely agent-focused, with no staff here to accept direct bookings. “We’re going to increase North American business to Europe and I have every confidence we will get it,” Zarmati said. “The message is we’re open, we’re vibrant, we’re the number on cruise line in Europe, we’re Italian…and we remain very agent friendly.
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