Skift Take
You can't bring a T-1 line with you at sea, but cruisers are connecting faster than ever before as cruise lines see a benefit to keeping communication quick and increasing customer loyalty.
For our second Skift Trends Report in April, we look at how cruise lines are rethinking on-board connectivity to deepen relationships with cruisers as well as connect with future customers.
For cruise lines, the past 15 years have been a period of constant evolution around customer-facing communications and information technologies.
For “The Rise of the New Connected Cruise” we go deep and speak with cruise line leaders about technology and interactivity, as well as what’s coming next for connected cruises. Features interviews with CIOs of Norwegian Cruise Line, Royal Caribbean Cruises, and Carnival Corporation, the three largest cruise lines in the world.
Where travelers once boarded cruise ships with the expectation of complete communications blackout from their daily lives, they now board with the expectation of total 24/7 connectivity — nevermind that they’re bobbing on the ocean, hundreds of miles beyond range of the nearest networks.
For cruise lines, today’s customer-facing IT landscape is tightrope walk between satisfying guest expectations, maintaining sustainable return on investment, predicting future trends and consumer demands, and finding workarounds to one of the most challenging communications environments faced by any of the world’s industries. The payoff? Happy customers equipped to broadcast their happiness to the world.
The first five pages of the 21-page report, including Table of Contents, are embedded below:
About These Reports
This is the fifteenth report in a series of twice-monthly trends reports that brief readers on a specific trend, providing insight into the current state of the market, the context around the trend, and where the industry is heading in the near future.
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Tags: amenities, carnival, royal caribbean, wi-fi
Photo credit: Read about the new connected cruise. Placeit by Breezi