The online booking story

My love affair with the cruise industry has now been going on for 10 years; an affair that started back in July 1999 on one very hot South Florida morning.

I had been hired by a large Cruise Agency to work with the web team to create the next generation of cruise websites. Cruise information on the web was limited back then, and having not cruised before I found it hard to get information on what a cruise vacation is all about. My cruise vacation perception at that time was the same as pretty much anyone who had never cruised.  Cruising involved a lot of shuffle board playing and was really suited for retirees; this perception changed when I took my first cruise.

I will not mention any names to protect the innocent (and the guilty), but I was dragged into a meeting and locked up for 5 days with the most knowledgeable people in the company. The meeting mostly focused on building an online cruise booking engine. This was all happening when the web was riding the dotcom bubble so money was not an issue; the company was investing mega dollars into this project.  During those early days many of us did not believe that people would actually book an entire cruise online  without talking to an agent.

The complexity of the product seemed to be the biggest stumbling block and back then there was no online booking engine that gave live pricing and cabin availability. So, you can imagine our joy as developers when we finally got the live pricing to display on a webpage by using the Sabre GDS to connect to the cruise lines’ computer systems. There were many challenges we had to face as everything we had to deal with was designed for Travel Agents who were trained in the process of booking a cruise. The challenges were enormous especially given that the cruise lines did ­not use a common protocol. Building a user-friendly interface was the biggest challenge of all; there was no site selling cruises online so we had to figure all this out. It is flattering that the flow we designed 10 years ago is now used by every site that offers online cruise booking capability.

We finally launched the content rich site in January of 2000 with live pricing availability including quite a few firsts like being the very first site to display deck plans and 360° virtual tours of the ships. By March we had finished Phase 2; now the customers were able to hold a cabin online and by entering their credit card on a secure page they could finalize the booking of their cruise vacation without any human interaction. Back in those pioneering days we only had 5 cruise lines that could be booked online: Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Celebrity, NCL & Princess; other cruise lines later followed.

As I look at the web now I am extremely proud of what we achieved. Booking a cruise online has become a no-brainer and thousands of cabins are now being booked daily. Knowing that every day thousands of happy people are cruising thanks to a cruise they bought online brings a big smile to my face and that is why every day is a happy day for me.

 Have you ever booked a cruise online? What was your experience? If you never booked online, why?

Antoine Zammit