Alyshia Bartlettt tells Travel Gossip why cruising is in her blood – and how she plans to make MSC the top trade sales team in the UK.
I grew up in Southampton. Both my great-granddads on my dad’s side worked at sea, for cruise lines. I always saw the cruise ships coming and going from my home town.
When I was little, I wanted to be an air hostess. I have family in America, so at the age of eight, I travelled to America on my own, on Virgin Atlantic. I was treated like a little princess onboard, and the Virgin girls all looked so lovely in their red uniforms; that’s why I wanted to get into the travel industry.
I started in cruising at 19. My first job was in a cruise line call centre and, after 18 months, I was seconded to the trade sales team and I never looked back!
I’ve always loved working with agents. It’s much nicer dealing with travel agents than consumers. They are more knowledgeable and understanding.
Someone I looked up to early in my career was Jenny Ellis. She used to head up cruise at Thomas Cook. People respected her. There weren’t a lot of females doing what she was doing in the industry at that time, and she really pushed cruise forward within Thomas Cook.
I moved to MSC 10 years ago because I was looking for a new challenge. Back then, MSC was a very small brand, it didn’t have a lot of UK guests, but I knew there were big growth plans on the horizon, with lots of new ships being planned, and I wanted to start telling people why they should sell MSC.
I never thought I’d see the day when we’d have tea and coffee-making facilities in cabins on MSC! I thought we’d never get that through, but now they are in all the cabins on all Southampton sailings. Small things like that show how far the company has come. There were a lot of misconceptions about MSC when I started, people thought that, because it was an Italian brand, only Italian would be spoken, but the first language onboard is English.
I look up to MSC UK Managing Director and Vice President of International Sales Antonio Paradiso. He did so well at a young age. He was able to come into the UK market and quickly understand it, even though it’s very different to other markets.
My biggest career challenge was COVID. Keeping our trade partners constantly updated regarding cancellations was hard. We were the first cruise line to resume sailing in the UK, and that meant a whole lot of new challenges, communicating new itineraries and prices and health and safety plans – you couldn’t travel just with a passport at that time. But the upside was that, having a brand-new ship – MSC Virtuosa – sailing from Southampton has helped raise awareness of the brand. Now it’s incredible to see that we have a ship based year-round from Southampton.
My career highlight so far was being heavily involved in the logistics for the naming ceremony of MSC Bellissima. She was christened by Sophia Loren in Southampton in 2019. We had such fantastic feedback from the trade, media and the consumers onboard.
A wow moment for me was going into Ocean Cay, MSC’s private island for the first time. It was on MSC World America. Seeing the lighthouse and the clear ocean, after only seeing them in photos, was amazing.
My top priority in my new role is to be recognised as being the number one trade sales team in the UK. I’d say that’s probably Jet2 right now, because they get a lot of awards, but we have a fantastic team, 79% of whom have been with us for over five years – three for over 10 years.
I want travel agents to see us as supportive, as a team they want to work with because they know we will support them. We know we need to be more visible, because when we visit stores we see an increase in bookings, so we need to be doing more face-to-face meetings.
We’ve just launched MSC Connections. We invite homeworkers and independent agents to a hotel for 45-minute face-to-face meetings with the team. We’ve already held the first one and we have 20 more throughout the rest of this year, and we’ll look to do more next year, once we see that it’s worked.
We are expanding our team. We want to become more visible, to help us reach more agents we aren’t currently working with, and target luxury agents who wouldn’t consider MSC because we need them to sell our Yacht Club, which is a real luxury product and service.
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