Cruise Retail Academy and frntlne join forces to elevate onboard confidence, engagement and sales

Cruise Retail Academy – a specialist in identifying and placing premier talent for the cruise industry – has announced a strategic partnership with frntlne, a leading provider of mobile-first digital training solutions for global brands.

This collaboration marks a significant step forward in revolutionizing how frontline cruise staff are prepared before commencing their careers at sea, connecting recruitment with a seamless and engaging training experience.

The Cruise Retail Academy understands that a successful career begins long before a candidate steps onboard. Its core value is not only to find the right people but to equip them with the skills and confidence necessary to excel onboard. By partnering with frntlne’s cutting-edge, bite-sized training platform, the Cruise Retail Academy is directly addressing a critical industry need: bridging the gap between talent acquisition and onboard readiness.

This partnership is built on a shared commitment to empowering individuals and setting a new standard for excellence in onboard retail, hospitality, and guest services.

Together, the partners are setting out to achieve the following key goals:

• Accelerate the Recruitment-to-Readiness Journey: “We will transform the onboarding process by empowering new hires with immediate access to essential brand training via a mobile-first, ‘TikTok-style’ platform, allowing them to arrive on their first day confident and prepared.”

• “Earn as You Learn” model: “Our combined platform will deliver personalized mobile-friendly training content, ensuring that crew members can earn and learn on their own terms, wherever they are in the world leveraging frntlne’s unique model of offering a free platform with incentives for frontline workers.”

• Enhance Operational Consistency and Compliance: “By standardizing training, we will ensure that sales staff in the cruise industry are equipped with the latest brand knowledge and service protocols, leading to a consistently exceptional guest experience. This is a direct outcome of frntlne’s science-backed methodology for knowledge retention and recall.”

• Boost Employee Confidence and Performance: Our goal is to see at least a 20%+ increase in employee confidence, as measured through our training analytics, leading to higher job satisfaction and improved cross-category sales performance driving measurable results for brands.”

• Expand Global Reach and Brand Partnerships:  “This exclusive collaboration will enable us to support a wider range of global brands across the onboard retail and hospitality sectors, creating more opportunities for sector-wide efficient, mobile-first training and nurturing diverse talent.”

Adrian Pittaway, CEO of Cruise Retail Academy, said, “This partnership with frntlne has been forged because we fully understand the ideal onboarding journey of new crew into the cruise industry. frntlne’s incentivized innovative Tik-Tok style training model will deliver the best possible win-win results for a trinity of brands, operators and crew. The operators get motivated and confident salespersons, the brands get improved brand knowledge from the outset, and the frontline colleagues get the confidence to generate higher sales and are rewarded for their training. We look forward to rolling out the frntlne platform with our many partners in the cruise industry and seeing the shared success.”

Michael Solomon, CEO of frntlne, added, “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Adrian and the Cruise Retail Academy team to bring a new era of training to the cruise industry. At frntlne, our mission is to empower frontline teams with knowledge and confidence in a way that’s engaging, rewarding, and effective from day one. The Cruise Retail Academy deeply understands the unique onboarding needs of crew, and together we’ll ensure brands, operators, and frontline colleagues all benefit from a smarter, more motivating approach to training. We can’t wait to see the positive impact this collaboration will deliver across the industry."