Danny Genung, owner and CEO of Harr Travel in Redlands, Calif., is a YouTube star in the cruise world.
In the past four years, he and director of marketing and media Taylor
Haenny have posted hundreds of videos, with Haenny behind the camera
and Genung in front of it.
Harr Travel has nearly 65,000 YouTube subscribers, and the agency’s most popular video, a full walk-through of Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas from nearly two years ago, has 1.7 million views.
Watch the entire video and you’ll feel like you’ve been on vacation
with Genung, exploring every corner of that massive ship. It’s well over
an hour long, which is typical of Harr Travel’s ship walk-through
videos.
Such productions are beyond the capability and/or desire of most
travel advisors, but Harr Travel has also posted simpler videos such as
how to use Royal Caribbean’s future cruise credits and the basics of travel insurance.
These types of informative videos are not difficult to produce,
Genung told travel advisors at an educational session at Travel Weekly’s
CruiseWorld on Wednesday.
Creating videos for the touchpoints of travel -- packing, the airport
experience, what’s in the cruise documents that arrive in the mail,
etc. -- is a service for customers and a timesaver for travel advisors,
Genung said.
“If you create a video for all of your touchpoints, you can send it
out -- you can still call customers -- but when you call them, they have
context. … They can see it, they can hear it, they can visualize it
themselves.”
Getting more specific, Genung said Harr Travel has posted videos
about how to check in for your Royal Caribbean cruise and what Disney
Cruise Line’s Navigator app looks like.
“So when they get there, what we hear all the time is, ‘I felt
prepared for my trip.’ That’s your job, that’s my job. That’s what we
all do.”