The Votes Are In !

[Dwayne]

The TravelTrade 2008 Reader's Choice Awards are as follows.

Top Cruise Lines

Domestic
Carnival Cruise Lines

Sales & Service
Princess Cruises

Europe
Costa Cruise Lines

Luxury
Crystal Cruises

Caribbean
Royal Caribbean International

Premium
Celebrity Cruises

Best Cruise Ship Overall
Holland America's Rotterdam


These results were based on Travel Agent's votes.

Dwayne

[penny3333]

Well at least Princess received an honorable mention, Costa as well. Thanks for posting this, Dwayne.

[drlivingston]

To me, it looks like one of those rigged contests where they try not to hurt anyone's feelings. They find a way to give everyone a trophy for something. Notice how no single company won two or more awards.

[Dwayne]

BTW, I accidently left one out;

River Cruises
Viking River Cruises and Uniworld River Cruises. It was a Tie.

Dwayne

[jack2007]

It would be interesting to find out the number of travel agents who actually bothered to vote. My guess would be less than 60%

Be interesting to see how tight the voting was.

These votes are not really really for us the consumer....they are more a well done slap on the back for the cruise lines benefit (IMHO)

There are so many different organisations giving their version of the best in cruises....some very biased and yet others are honest & independent views that it is almost meaningless to me.

I'm guessing that most British/Spanish or German cruise lines were probably excluded and even though I have never been on an Aida ship they are meant to be pretty good.
so maybe it would be fairer to show all the cruiselines voted for in this traveltrade awards so we can judge the bias ?

Oh and I do realise that this was the readers awards but do they not take an interest in all cruiselines or is it just the mainly american ships they get used to ?

I would be interested to know the cruiselines voted for in "the best cruise line in europe." I wonder if they could think of more than six ?

[Berick1234]

I think some of the awards were like "Kissing Your Sister".

Bob E

[Dwayne]

jack2007, you can read more about the voting process here.

I personally don't know what the numbers are that you are interested in. You might try contacting them. Here is a link to their contact info.

Dwayne

[jack2007]

thanks Dwayne,
I do have a bit of a interest in the topic but I thought my reply might open up the topic for more discussion and debate.Give others a chance to say whether they thought awards like this are worthwhile instead of my biased opinion that they are not.
As we have some travel agents on here I thought they might give a reasonable explanation that possibly might change my mind about awards like this.

[LisaP]

I am not a travel agent, although I am a researcher who develops and relies on surveys to identify trends and other data pertinent to my area of study.

It would be interesting to find out the number of travel agents who actually bothered to vote. My guess would be less than 60%

Yes, it is likely less than 60%. Perhaps even less than 40%. Without seeing the underlying data, which is proprietary, there's no knowing the actual percentage. But, that does not diminish the results in any way. Obviously, you are not going to get an entire population to respond. Fortunately, there are mathematical formulas that can be used to determine an appropriate sample size that will yield similar responses as if the entire population was surveyed. In the States, we saw this in action in the months up to the Presidential election -- the ultimate result was not much different than the most recent polls.

If you really want to dig deeper into this, look up the terms "statistically significant," "confidence intervals," and "margin of error." I didn't want to bore the Membership with these details.

[sparks1093]

I didn't want to bore the Membership with these details.

Whew, my eyes were glazing over all ready