Catching Up with Seabourn’s Mark Tamis

Last year was a busy year for Seabourn. From merging its sales team with Holland America’s to several executive changes, Carnival Corp’s luxury brand underwent a lot of change between July 2024 and the end of the year.

Mark Tamis, Seabourn’s current president, joined the company as part of the leadership changes that also saw the departures of Natalya Leahy and Steve Smotrys from Seabourn and the transfer of Gus Antorcha from Holland America Line to Princess.

It was a lot for travel advisors to absorb, and Tamis made reaching out to the trade a priority in his first few months.

“I was in the office for one day in Miami and the next day I flew to the UK for a week of trade and media and then I came back and spent a week with the U.S. trade,” Tamis told TMR during a sit-down at Seatrade Cruise Global in Miami earlier this month. “I got great feedback. It varied for sure. Some people were super happy, some people a little bit more concerned… Change is hard.”

Though the feedback was mixed, overall, the response to all the changes has been positive, he said.

“Change is hard in general,” Tamis said, adding that when he dug into some of the concerns that advisors expressed, he often found they were related to things that had happened earlier. In particular, some advisors were still upset over personnel changes that might have happened years earlier but had never been communicated properly.

Relationships between advisors and “their person,” as Tamis put it, can be “very emotional and personal.” Even though these advisors, when pushed, admit they like their new business development manager or national sales account rep, they’re still unsettled by previous changes.

“It’s just that there was a change, and it probably wasn’t communicated deeply enough… so communication, over communication, availability, is just so important.”

One message he also wants advisors to understand is that the merging of the two sales teams wasn’t as sudden as it might have seemed.

“Big parts of the organization have been integrated for years,” he said “Big parts of the sales organization and even some of the BDMs, have been integrated for two to three years. It’s not something that just six months ago we said, okay, this is happening. It’s kind of been in this transition for a couple of years.”

Elevating Seabourn’s communication with advisors is important to Tamis. He has made and continues to make in-person trips to visit key agency partners, along with Rob Coleman (Holland America’s senior vice president of sales for North America also overseeing Seabourn’s sales).

“The trade is so valuable in our industry… even more so in the luxury space and the expedition space because there’s a lot of nuances and there’s a lot of new-to-cruise in this space.”

Is Seabourn on the Way Out?

One myth that Tamis has also been working to dispel is the idea that Carnival Corp. might be cleaning Seabourn up in order to sell it off. That, he told TMR, is patently untrue. And, he added, he never would have joined the company as president if that was the endgame.

“Yes, there’s been transition. There was a ship sold… but I wouldn’t be here. We all have choices and if this was about, clean it up and get us ready for some sort of transaction, that’s not what I do. I love to build teams and deliver, in this case, luxury cruise vacations and expeditions.”

Rather than being focused on stability so that Carnival can sell the brand, Tamis said his focus on stability is in order to elevate the product.  

Seabourn Welcomes New Competition

Staying on top of product quality is particularly important these days as several new entrants are scheduled to make their debut over the next few years including Four Seasons Yachts, Orient Express, and Aman.

Tamis isn’t worried.

“I think it’s great. It increases the population of people considering cruises who maybe never considered themselves a cruiser because they have a misconception about cruising,” he said. “The more people explore it, the more they’ll realize, wow, this could be pretty cool.”

The influx of these new cruise options represents a great opportunity for advisors, he added, because it’s the advisor who will be able to point clients in the direction of the line that is right for them.

“It’s about getting the right guest on the right brand and getting that first experience great. Because once they have that first experience, they’re sold.”

Luxury Clientele Resilient in Face of Economy

With our conversation with Tamis concurrent with the Stock Market crashing in early April, the economy was a natural topic of conversation. During the Seatrade Cruise Global CEO panel, Carnival Corp. president and CEO of Carnival Corp. mentioned a “choppy” wave. We asked Tamis if Seabourn was part of that choppiness.

“It’s definitely more resilient,” he said of the luxury market, but did admit Seabourn saw “waves within waves.” But what’s “amazing,” he added is 2025 is almost sold out and expeditions for next year is also already almost sold out.

“Ocean has some inventory but both for next year and the year after are well ahead of where we were a year ago for this year,” he said.

Another sign that business isn’t slowing down much for Seabourn is its onboard future sales.

“They are as busy as ever… that hasn’t changed, that’s still very strong.”