Roughly 3,000 miles from cruise line Lindblad Expeditions' New York headquarters, bands of naturalists regularly crawl over the Galapagos Islands' marine iguana-laden lava rocks, swim through azure waters with Galapagos penguins, or keep their eyes peeled skyward — or at least treeward — in hopes of glimpsing either the island's famed finch, or at very least the red-footed booby.

Now, not every cruise enthusiast takes joy in such activities, so filling Lindblad's berths is sometimes a challenge for vice president of marketing Richard Genovese. Granted, Lindblad doesn't boast the capacity of larger firms. It offers just 17,000 spaces a year, while at any given moment Carnival Corp. has 134,000 berths available.

Lindblad relies heavily on an internal database to fill its ships. The file contains 70,000 households with at least one member who's traveled with the line, and 450,000 more who expressed an interest in doing so.

Up until two years ago, the latter had been generated from business reply cards. The problem was that the names were unqualified, except that they read a magazine in line with Lindblad's naturalist orientation like Audubon or Natural History.

" [The system] just captured names and addresses. It allowed us to mail to them, but not intelligently," Genovese says.

Before Genovese arrived in May 2004, if Lindblad had to fill a 150-berth ship, it would send out more than 150,000 pieces — sometimes a travel-preference survey, occasionally a full-color catalog. Annual mailings amounted to between 6 million and 7.5 million pieces. In 2006 it probably will send between 4 million and 5 million pieces while maintaining booking levels.

Lindblad's earlier, higher mailing quantities were the result of following a standard practice in cruise industry prospecting. " It's amazing how many people will pull in a bunch of selects [from a data compiler] and tell you 'We built a model,'" says Peter Harvey, president and CEO of Intellidyn Corp., an analytics firm brought in to boost Lindblad's number-crunching capabilities. " They buy a base and pummel the heck out of it."

Under Intellidyn's guidance, Lindblad has embraced several models that evaluate prospects' likelihood to purchase as a direct result of a solicitation, or to call for more information. Now Lindblad can either run a campaign that generates sales through outreach, or design efforts geared to draw calls to its offices, where salespeople close the deal.

Intellidyn also uses its models to rank a compiled file of United States consumers. This allows Lindblad to quickly add prospects if one of its ships is significantly under-booked.

And Lindblad is able to identify discrete consumer segments thanks to the wealth of variables these files contain. Even before doing its analysis, the cruise line knew its customers were about 10 years younger than most prospects of larger cruises. They're also more adventurous and outdoorsy.

It turns out there are several vocational groups that respond enthusiastically to Lindblad's offerings. For example, reasonably successful actors who are between stints: " They're young, aggressive and adventurous. This is the Lindblad traveler," says Harvey.

Farmers — especially livestock farmers — also snap up the cruises, and they can be targeted based on seasonality depending on the crops or animals they raise. Once the year's crop is taken in, farmers have extra cash and a bit of time before the next planting season, and they've proven to be fertile targets.

Using total-nation files also increases the odds that some hard-to-find prospects won't be overlooked. Harvey estimates that 15% of the households Intellidyn's analytics unearths won't be found on the response files generally used by travel and entertainment marketers.

While the cruise line sends catalogs to likely prospects, it continues to supplement the prospect database through survey mailings.

Lindblad is studying how customers migrate among its various destinations and whether home location plays a role in their choices. To that end, it will begin testing lifestyle interests. Harvey feels this is an obvious step. " If you like to go to rain forests and I send you scuba diving stuff, it's not relevant. That's our next frontier," he says.

ROUGHLY 3,000 MILES FROM cruise line Lindblad Expeditions’ New York headquarters, bands of naturalists regularly crawl over the Galapagos Islands’ marine iguana-laden lava rocks, swim through azure waters with Galapagos penguins, or keep their eyes peeled skyward