Posted on March 2, 2003 - by Ralph Grizzle

Jumping Ship

Now more than three decades old, the North American cruise industry is attracting many fresh faces, some to fill newly created positions, others to replace the old guard. High profiles executives, such as Holland America Line’s Linda Ehlenberger and Royal Caribbean International’s Mike Applebaum, recently resigned their long-held posts as vice presidents of sales for their respective companies.

Holland America Line was conducting an “internal and external” search to replace Ehlenberger, who resigned after 10 years with the company. Royal Caribbean International does not plan fill the void left when Applebaum stepped down earlier this year.

As with Royal Caribbean, Carnival Corporation’s executives tend to have been with the company for “many, many years,” says a Carnival Corp. spokesperson. “And we typically promote from within.”

That said, recruiting new talent from outside the cruise industry tends to be one of the more active segments within the hospitality sector, according to Karine Gill, who leads the Hospitality & Leisure Specialty Practice group for Coral Gables, Florida-based Spencer Stuart, a leading management consulting firm specializing in senior-level executive search and board director appointments.

As the industry matures, Gill says, it is looking increasingly to the outside to fill executive positions. “It’s a trend we’ve seen for the past five or six years,” she says, adding that the search outside the industry serves to broaden available talent.

“In its initial phases, the cruise industry was a very small, very networked group of people,” she says. “Now as it has become a more mature part of the leisure industry, we are now at a point where we’re looking outside. At Spencer Stuart, we do all levels of functional expertise, from the supply chain to operations to culinary to human resources, and for most of these cases, we tend to go outside the cruise industry.”

CFI recently talked with three executives who came from other professions to begin their careers in cruising.

Edie Bornstein, Vice President of Business Development, Cunard Line
Edie Bornstein got her job because of Queen Mary. Not the former British monarch, mind you, but Cunard Line’s $800 million new-build.

Bornstein stepped aboard in the newly created position of vice president of business development in February 2001. She was charged with developing co-branding relationships for Queen Mary 2.

“Cunard Line’s president at the time recognized that Queen Mary 2 was going to be an anomaly in the cruise industry,” Bornstein says. “He felt there would be tremendous co-branding opportunities. He [Larry Pimentel] called and said, ‘Edie, I’ve thought about this with you in mind, and I’d like for you to talk with Pam [Conover] and Debbie [Natansohn] and see if we can work this out,’ We did. Pam and Debbie hired me, and I’ve been here two years.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Nova Southeastern University, Bornstein worked as a travel consultant for Liberty Travel in New Jersey. She later took a position with System One, the Eastern Airlines entity that became Amadeus. Bornstein remained with Amadeus for nearly 14 years, serving as vice president, cruise and specialty sales & marketing.

Bornstein had an early baptism into the cruise industry. Her role at Amadeus required that she attend ship inaugurals, where she rubbed elbows with cruise line executives. And because she loved to cruise, Bornstein spent all of her vacations on ships. Today, the single mom cruises with her son, who, at age 13, can claim having been on 26 cruises.

Cunard Line possibly could have looked within to fill the new business development position, but Bornstein says she had the experience that Pimentel, Conover and Natansohn were seeking. “They certainly knew my background and the kind of person I was and what they were looking to achieve with this division,” Bornstein says, “They really felt my personality fit the position.”

Since coming on board with Cunard, she has forged co-branding relationships with Canyon Ranch, operators of the award-winning health resorts. Canyon Ranch has designed and will operate the QM2’s spa. She also engaged four-star chef, Daniel Boulud, whose New York restaurant has been rated one of the 10 best in the world, to create signature menus exclusively for Cunard.

Rick Abramson, President, Delta Queen Steamboat Company
As the former director of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Rick Abramson has seen more rockets launched into space than he has ships pushed out to sea. “I’m a real new kid on the block,” Abramson says. “But while the cruise industry itself and the marine aspects are certainly new to me, hospitality and tourism aren’t.”

With more than 35 years of hospitality experience, Abramson says he will incorporate acquired management techniques to transform the Delta Queen Steamboat Company. Abramson’s long-time employer, Delaware North Companies, rescued venerable DQ from bankruptcy last year.

Charged with managing America’s oldest continuously operating cruise line and its three paddle wheelers, Abramson says he will employ some of the strategies he brings to the job from other positions he has held. In fact, just as he did at the Kennedy Space Center, he thinks of himself as the steward of a “special place.” Delta Queen’s historic ships, he says, are indeed special places and should be marketed as such.

With that in mind, he says he will steer Delta Queen away from the rest of the cruise industry. One of the company’s biggest challenges, he says, is to avoid being identified with the larger market. “One of our boats is a 75-year-old wooden boat on the historical registry,” Abramson says. “The experience we provide is so much different than a cruise. That’s the challenge, trying to get identified as something different than the blue water cruise experience.”

Abramson does plan to glean from industry models. He will attend industry conferences, and he confesses to wanting to meet some of the “legends” in the industry. “I also need to get on a couple of the big boats to see the programs and what people are gravitating to,” he says.

His course is clearly charted, however. “I’m not worried about how many umbrella drinks we sell,” Abramson says. “I want to make sure we distance ourselves from the rest of the industry and create a really unique experience that people talk about. I don’t have huge advertising budgets, so my advertising is really on the backs of my passengers, and I have to show them a fantastic time so that they say to their friends, ‘Hey, this is really something you need to do.’ ”

John Meszaros, Vice President, Supply Chain Management, Carnival Corp.
Talk about a greenhorn. John Meszaros had never even been on a ship when he took the helm as Carnival Corporation’s vice president, supply chain management. Never been on a ship, but now he’s responsible for the world’s largest fleet of cruise ships.

His charge is to negotiate, contract and partner with the hundreds of vendors that supply Carnival Corp.’ six cruise brands. Until he joined the company, Carnival Corp. had four autonomous companies with four purchasing groups. There was some interaction, he says, but no formal strategy to pull it all together in a single supply chain.

Consolidating the groups under one umbrella made sense, Meszaros says, particularly with regard to helping Carnival Corp., which purchases more than $1 billion in supplies annually, to achieve greater economies of scale.

Meszaros says by consolidating purchases, his department has been able to cut cost while improving quality. “Since I’ve been here, we’ve basically focused on food and beverage,” he says. “We’ve done a great job in taking cost out and improving quality in food and beverage.”

Meszaros’s biggest challenges thus far have been bridging the cultural differences between Carnival Corp.’s different brands ““ Costa and Cunard, for example – and coordinating between the port of calls and Carnival Corp’s ships.

“It’s a little different from land-based supply in that our customers [the ships] continually move,” Meszaros says. “So the challenge is making sure that we have a worldwide supply of services that meet the needs of the ships no matter where they are.”

A resident of Miami Beach, Meszaros served eight years as supply chain vice president for Dallas-based AmeriServe Food Distribution (formerly PepsiCo Foods Systems), a food service distributor for several national chain restaurants, He also spent four years as a consultant with Systems Modeling Corporation, a leading provider of computer simulation software, and three years in operations at Frito-Lay Inc.

“In my old world,” he says, “I did very similar things and there was very similar integration, but I had very defined customers in very defined locations. If we missed a delivery time, the customer was still there. We could be an hour late. But if I am an hour late now, the ships are gone. I’ve never been in a position where the supply chain timing was so critical.”

A tough job, no doubt, with lots of stress associated. We know just the cure: a cruise.