Travel Centres’ new cruise marketing initiative for consumers — Travelbug: The Wonderful World of Cruising is a  digital magazine designed to provide a tailored and comprehensive overview of the wonderful world of ocean and river cruising to consumers who are likely confused and overwhelmed by the mass of information in circulation.

This new publication is designed to act as a one-stop primer that will help:

• Enlighten curious customers as to the experiential value that cruising represents
• Assist consumers in choosing the right cruise product by providing a single source of information about multiple offerings within a single publication
• Give our member agents a powerful sales tool to help them proactively suggest and promote cruising as an alternative travel option — particularly to people who have never cruised before
• Persuade both travel consultants and consumers alike that conversations about cruising should focus more on the value proposition and less on price
• Dispel common preconceptions about cruise holidays that commonly deter customers

Your Travelbug Content Options

Participating brands have three options as follows:

Option A: Two A4 pages at a cost of €399, one page of which needs to be artwork and one page editorial content with a maximum word count of 400 words

Option B: Three pages which can be either a two-page spread of your ad artwork with one page of editorial content (max 400 words), or a single page A4 ad with 2 pages of editorial content (max 900 words).

Option C: Four pages at a cost of €599, two pages of which can be a two-page spread of your ad artwork with two pages of editorial content (max 900 words). Or a single page A4 ad with 3 pages of editorial content to a maximum word count of 1200 words.

Submissions in excess of four pages can be accommodated and will be priced on a pro-rata basis and contain the same approximate ratio of editorial content to artwork.

NB: Options B and C above allow space for the addition of photos, so please include a selection of 3-4 for our designers to work with. All prices exclude VAT @23%

Because this will be a digital publication, we encourage you to maximise the benefits  by assembling content in both your artwork and editorial that includes embedded links to additional resources such as videos and dedicated landing pages on your website (NB:  website landing pages must not contain opportunities to book directly but rather refer readers back to their Travel Centres member agent.)

Editorial Content

In order to ensure the publication remains reader-friendly and visually consistent, our design team will create text pages to accompany your ad content. We strongly encourage you to create your content using structured heading, subheadings and paragraphs and avoid the use of bullet-point lists for sequences of long sentences.

Each brand’s introductory page will include a side-bar panel within their page(s) of editorial content in order to:

• Create a sense of visual continuity and cohesion across the publication as a whole
• Provide readers with some digestible factoids about each brand, at a glance

Please complete the various fields within the form below

Suggested Facts

1. Number of ships in Fleet
2. Average age of ships in Fleet
3. Number of worldwide ports served
4. Number of cruise itineraries in Europe
5. Number of cruise itineraries in North America/Caribbean
6. Number of cruise itineraries in South/Central America
7. Number of cruise itineraries in Asia/Oceania
8. Onboard Facilities Unique to your brand (simple list please)

Excellent insights and advice from those in the know

In addition to your own content, the publication will also include insightful, complementary content from Travel Centres along with commissioned articles from well-known travel journalists. This will add value and reach to your content, helping to ensure an excellent return on your investment.

Advice and Guidance for your Content

The deadline date for receipt of artwork and editorial content is Friday, May 16th, whilst the proposed publication date is scheduled for late May/early June, 2025

Because of the potential longevity of the publication and our wish to move away from distilling the relative value of everything down to price, we recommend that your submitted editorial content and artwork not include references to pricing. (Embedded links may refer readers to dynamically priced content on websites but not within the publication itself. Readers should be referred back to the agent of record for booking fulfilment). Each edition of the publication will be personalised for the benefit of each participating travel agency and will contain their logo and contact details.

Artwork Guidelines

The pages of this digital publication will be A4 portrait in size (210mm x 297mm), and so submitted artwork must be supplied to these dimensions and include a 3mm ‘bleed’ margin, in case some agents elect to produce and distribute a hard-copy version as well. Artwork should be provided as high-resolution PDF files. Double-page spread artwork should be supplied to a finished size of 420 x 210mm plus 3mm bleed (total size 426 x 216mm). To allow for a comfortable reading experience, we recommend a margin of at least 25mm around all text. Please note that in order to maintain the integrity and quality of the publication, we cannot accept in-house produced artwork created with Canva, Microsoft Word etc.