Riding the waves: cruise-ship meeting company Landry & Kling Meetings at Sea sets sail on its own, again

South Florida CEO, August, 2005 by Rowland Stiteler

Travel industry pioneers Josephine "Jo" Kling and Joyce Landry seem to find success less than a challenge.

The business partners recently spun off their corporate cruise-line meetings company, Landry & Kling Meetings at Sea, from its comfortable spot as part of a travel conglomerate, and have struck out on their own.

The move is risky, because Landry & Kling focuses on putting together corporate meetings, conferences and incentive trips on cruise liners, operating in a segment of the hospitality industry--business group travel--that is often the first thing companies cut when economic crisis hits.

Even so, taking risks has rewarded the two women in the past: This is the second time they have ventured away from stable travel industry executive jobs. Both ignored the advice of their industry peers and left positions with New York-based Holland America Cruise Lines in 1982 to launch Landry & Kling. They started their company with $25,000 in working capital and two employees--themselves. Now, the company has approximately 20 employees in its Coral Gables headquarters and expects to gross $25 million of revenues this year.

"It is really not an overstatement to say they were pioneers in creating what has become an important market segment for the cruise industry," says Sean Mahoney, vice president, worldwide charters and sales, of Fort Lauderdale-based Silversea Cruises Ltd., a four-ship line with an extensive corporate meeting and event clientele. "They were able to show corporate meeting groups the advantages of using cruise ships well before most groups had even thought it was a possibility."

Corporations and cruise lines have increasingly embraced the "meetings at sea" concept, experts say. In January, Landry & Kling pulled off its biggest single event ever when it brought in five cruise ships to serve as floating hotels for Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville.

"The industry took notice of what they can do, as well as the versatility of what can be done with cruise ships," Mahoney says. "They obviously had help with what they did, but it was definitely a high-profile event for Landry & Kling."

While circumspect about the specific details, Landry (the company's CEO) says she and Kling (its president) are planning something similar for the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami. "And it is something that can be replicated anywhere you have port facilities," she adds.

The business partners are also reaching out to new market segments, such as technical training seminars for lawyers, doctors and other professionals, which are now commonly held in resort hotels. The company is also targeting groups with smaller meeting budgets, such as associations, using software it developed for predicting meetings' cost.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"[We] measure costs for various events in a way which will allow us to present good options to groups on a budget," Kling says.

Cruise ships are a good match for a company with tight event budgets, says incentive consultant Lance Wieland, president of Global Events Group of Falmouth, Maine. "Elements like entertainment and food costs, which are add-ons if you are putting together a conference in a land-based hotel, are all essentially free on a cruise ship," he says. "There is money to be saved versus the price of doing an event in a four-star hotel."

Corporate event planner Gail Davis, now president of her own event company in Colleyville, Texas, worked with Landry & Kling when she was the event planner for Plano, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Inc. "The EDS people were skeptical at first," she says. "I am not sure the top executives like the idea of being more or less captive on board with all their employees. But ... that's what the employees did like--access to their bosses. And most corporate groups tend to like the idea that a cruise ship offers a place where your attendees are not going anywhere."

Success with large clients, such as EDS, put Landry & Kling on the map in the travel industry, and in 1988 Delray Beach-based Travel Services International bought the company. Kling and Landry continued to run the firm, as a division of their corporate parent. After a series of mergers and acquisitions involving the parent company, Landry & Kling ended up as part of Boston-based National Leisure Group (NLG). Kling and Landry, still running things, bought the company back in May with private financing. Landry says the price was 10 cents on the dollar compared to what they sold it for seven years ago.

NLG CEO Aaron Gowell declined to comment on why the company was willing to sell Landry & Kling, but Landry says it had a lot to do with the fact that their firm was the only group-travel entity among a host of individual leisure travel companies NLG acquired in a mass purchase.

"We just weren't a fit for the type of companies in their portfolio," she says.

Kling and Landry also hinted to NLG that they were itching to be entrepreneurs again, and neither partner was bound by non-compete contracts. "We could have opened up a new company with a very similar name to our original company, and started competing," Kling says. "Or, they could sell it back to us, which is what we much preferred."