Riviera Travel News and Updates: One-on-One With Marilyn Conroy

Riviera Travel recently launched a re-brand and is making a big push to North American market.

We caught up with Marilyn Conroy, Riviera Travel’s executive vice president of business development, at the 2025 ASTA River Cruise Expo to learn more about the brand’s changes and what’s to come.

TravelPulse: Congratulations on your new role as executive vice president of business development!

Marilyn Conroy: Thank you. I've always been responsible for sales organizations in its entirety, but we're expanding, and I need somebody to do more of the administrative side of it and leave me to do what actually I really like to do, which is interact with agents and seek out new business. It'll give me the time to do it while still working in tandem with the sales directors.

Marilyn Conroy has been appointed to a new role as executive vice president of business development (Photo Credit: Riviera Travel)

TP: Can you tell us more about this re-brand to Riviera Travel and the decision making process behind it? 

MC: The product Riviera is offering our agents and, of course, their clients today, is completely different from what it would have been about five years ago. Riviera Travel has always been Riviera Travel in the UK, and they sell more than just river cruises. They're a tour operator and have been in business for 40 years. But when we were marketing over here in North America, we just sold river cruises. It became quite evident that the North American market needs more than just a river cruise. They need to be able to present to their clients air, transfers, hotels, and tours, so that's something that we can now offer.

We needed to re-brand to be able to demonstrate that it's a not just Riviera River Cruises, it's Riviera Travel. We are more than just selling river cruises and taking that a little bit further. Not only are we going to be doing pre and post tours on our cruises, which we've always done for a while, but we will do grand tours of Europe. So, you could take with Riviera Travel maybe an 11-night tour of Italy and combine it with a river cruise experience. So rebranding was to emphasize to the trade and the consumer that we're more than just selling river cruises. It's a total full-service company – a one stop shop, if you like.

TP: What are your thoughts on this River Cruise Expo and the importance of being here? 

MC: This is our second year here, and I'm not just saying this, but it is a direct result of being at the River Cruise Expo last year and the interaction we had with so many of those agents, and they are really qualified agents if they're coming here, but it's a direct result of talking to them that they said to us what we needed to do to be more appealing to the North American marketplace. Our hardware, the ships themselves have always been spectacular, and they are beautiful, beautiful ships built and operated by Scylla. But you have to obviously Americanize the product, because primarily we've been marketing only to the UK, so we were able to talk to these clients, and we really do listen. I know everybody says they listen, but some do, some don’t.

So we modified the product to be more inclusive by giving more than just one sure excursion, for instance. Overall guest satisfaction is to do not just wine and beer and soft drinks with lunch and dinner, but to have an open bar basically from 6 p.m. until  midnight.  And this enhances the experience definitely because we're the only premium line to include the liquor after the lunch and the dinner. I mean, if you're on a river cruise, it's small, you're going to meet people. You're going to meet new friends you may have lunch or dinner with them. And isn't it nice to be able to say come have a drink in the bar, so you don't have to sit there and say, ‘oh, who's going to be picking up the check?’ It just makes a better, more relaxed atmosphere when you're not being nickeled and dimed. Because if you look now the Riviera product, it's really all-inclusive with the exception of gratuities, which are totally at the client's discretion. And I think that's what the North American market wants. They want an inclusive product, especially in this category.

Another thing that we we've started last year, and we're going to be expanding on it, are the theme cruises, because that encourages a certain set. I mean, if you've got a gastronomy cruise or a cruise going to the gardens, and you can go to the arboretums and put together retail and group promotions, it makes it much, much easier for our agency partners to put together groups with these themed cruises. If they want to say market to a wine club that's local on a retail or a group basis, all the extra work is done for them. Up until a couple of years ago we really didn't offer theme cruises, so that's another type of draw where we're able to expand. Groups is really our focus. I think you'll find it's the most lucrative group policy in the industry. It's one for seven. In other words, the eighth person is free. So if an agent books just four cabins they'll get one bed free, and on top of their commission that would generate roughly about $7,000 in commission. So it's lucrative to sell groups even though they're small groups. I mean, people think groups have to be 20, 30, 40 people. No, not on Riviera, just four cabins.

TP: What can you tell us about these new ships coming up? 

MC: The new ship, the Riviera Rose, coming this year on the Douro. It’s a smaller ship because the Douro is much narrower river. The vessels have to be smaller. Then we've got the Riviera Radiance coming out this year as well, and she's beautiful. She's a slightly different design, the bar, it's a wrap around bar and the restaurants underneath. If you look at our setup here (on the William Wordsworth), it's similar, but you can't see down. [The Radiance] is much, much more open.

Plus, we're going to have two alternative restaurants. You've got one on this ship, this this restaurant here at Bistro, and we're also going to have a Tapas restaurant. So we're going to have two alternative restaurants and the Resilience is a sister ship to the Radiance. The cabins, the master suites are going to be fabulous – 350 square feet, and that's huge, huge, for a river cruise. The whole design is very light, bright, modern, airy. So I'm really excited to see her and certainly to experience her.

TP: There's been a lot of talk about river cruising and making it appealing to a younger generation, what are your thoughts on that?

MC:The average age on river cruising has gone down for everybody. Basically, because it's just become far more popular. People want to go to more immersive destinations. We joke that ocean cruises take you to the country, we take you to the destination, and that's true when you think about it. But it's how we have the onboard programs. I mean, we've got the gymnasium because people are more active. We've got bicycles. We are tailor making more tours to appeal to a younger clientele, so it flows through because you've got the features to appeal to them. 

Because river cruising, originally, I mean, it's been growing every year, I think it's fastest growing segment of the travel marketplace. It started out, replacing the land tours, you know, if it's Tuesday, it must be Belgium, so it automatically got a wrap for you know, you have to be 80 and sitting up on the deck drinking hot coffee watching the castles go by, but because we've modified our onboard program, and the prices are so inclusive it is encouraging a younger clientele. Our average age is now between 55 and 59, which is great. And we don't take children under 12.

TP: Yeah, I have a five-year-old and I love to show her the world, but not on a river cruise yet.

MC: No, no way. Can you imagine having a five-year-old and the way they climb?

TP: And my two-year-old as well. They’re a handful!

MC: But the age, the average age is going down. It's going down for us, and I think in all candor, it is going down for everybody. Because river cruising is just growing in popularity. And let's face it, the Millennials are a big segment. And they have they have the income to do it.

TP: How does Riviera Travel work with travel advisors? What do advisors not here in attendance need to know?  

MC:I've been in this business quite a while and I've always been an advocate for the travel advisor. That's one of one of Rviera's best practices, that we don't market directly to their clients, we market through them. In other words, we'll do a program with a travel partner where they are marketing Riviera to their clients. We don't try and circumvent them. We're very responsive and supportive of the travel partners.

We're getting a lot easier to do business with. We're going to have a new website coming out in June, which is going to be far easier to navigate because our website right now is, it's not the best to be truthful, it needs updating. And we're also going to have a nice e-learning center on there, a proper training course. Now, having said that, myself and all the sales directors are always willing to do webinars for agents, not just nationally, but if they want one just for their counselors or for a consumer night, we will do webinars all the time. But there's nothing like, really being able to go online, sitting down and becoming a Riviera expert.

Every time an agent comes on board, they go ‘wow, the ship's beautiful!’ The hardest thing for me is to get them to trust us with their clients because we're not a household name.

We've only been in marketing in North America for seven years, so we don't have the brand awareness. So it's getting the word out, getting them to trust that we are truly a product that's the very top of the premium line, the very top, but we have significantly less than premium prices.

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