Chaotic Travel Season Spurs Cruise Line to Offer Innovative Creature Comfort: “Virtual Get-Togethers”

SANTA BARBARA, CA June 26, 2007

Cruise West Eases Strain for Traveling Guests and Extends into New Markets Worldwide with Citrix GoToWebinar

While high fares, crowded airplanes and long waits become commonplace during this summer’s busy vacation season, some cruise lines are responding by going beyond the call of duty to improve the travel experience. Cruise West is providing an additional service by holding “virtual get-togethers” for guests and staff to get to know one another. Before embarking on each journey, cruise directors conduct Web seminars with Citrix® GoToWebinar™ from Citrix Online, a division of Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS). The service provides Cruise West with a simple and affordable forum for passengers to meet and discuss their trips, and helps the company attract new customers worldwide.

With minimal costs, Cruise West hosts up to 45 Web seminars per month while reaching a wide audience for sales, marketing and training. “With GoToWebinar, we can help build customer relationships, educate prospective passengers on our niche cruises and train travel agents remotely,” stated Leigh Strinsky, manager of product development at Cruise West. “We consider GoToWebinar to be an extension of our company that helps us differentiate from our deeper-pocketed competitors.”

With its self-service interface, GoToWebinar is the only meeting and event product purpose-built for do-it-yourself Webinars. Cruise West is able to plan, deliver, record and analyze Webinars quickly and easily without technical support, and impart a professional image to registrants and attendees helping increase brand recognition, customer interest and sales.

“We had no technical issues with GoToWebinar and we gained six to eight hours a week in productivity. The simplicity of GoToWebinar means everything to us. Other solutions we tried were cumbersome and costly. One required us to go through up to eight hours of training before we could even start. GoToWebinar is by far the smoothest and, unlike the other solutions, it paid for itself in the first meeting.”

Cruise West also benefits from GoToWebinar’s All You Can Reach™ pricing model that offers unlimited Web events with up to 1,000 attendees. “The low cost is fantastic it allows us to use the money we save to expand the program and deliver better presentations,” explained Strinsky. “And, previously, we were limited to 50 people. If we exceeded that number, one solution started charging by the minute!”

“GoToWebinar is designed to give smaller businesses like Cruise West an innovative approach to building customer loyalty and extending its reach into new markets never before possible,” said Mike Mansbach, vice president of product marketing and business development for Citrix Online. “When CruiseWest looked at streamlining and doing business more efficiently, they learned how an online meeting and conferencing solution could make them even more successful than before.”

With the help of GoToWebinar, Cruise West has increased revenue, improved productivity and decreased spending. “Guests of our Webinars are three to four times more likely to book a cruise after attending. As a result, GoToWebinar has become vital to our business,” concluded Strinsky.

GoToWebinar has won numerous awards since its launch a year ago, including Frost & Sullivan’s Best New Web Conferencing Service Award, SIIA Codie Award for Best Communication Solution, Small Business Computing Excellence Award, Small Business Technology Magazine Product of the Year Award and LAPTOP Magazine’s Editors’ Choice Award.

For more information about GoToWebinar, please visit www.gotowebinar.com, for a complimentary trial visit www.gotowebinar.com/media or to learn more about Cruise West’s Virtual Cruise Presentations, visit http://www.cruisewest.com/cruisewest/vcn_info.aspx.

 
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