Today’s consumers are constantly tethered to their smartphones and they expect companies to provide experiences that are highly personalized and in real-time. As a result, modern businesses need to find a way to accommodate their customer’s preferences for easy access to information and services. That was the situation facing Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd. 

Royal Caribbean's vision was to make information and services available in real-time on mobile in order to reduce typical travel friction and frustrations, and allowing for more time for adventure and exploration. 

To enable modern, mobile experiences for passengers, the cruise line needed a way to handle mobile traffic and extract data from their legacy system—without a complete rip and replace. Plus, data needed to be orchestrated across both land and sea—which is no small feat.  Any downtime to accommodate an upgrade could delay voyages and be very costly.

Royal Caribbean couldn’t run a cloud on its ships due to space constraints and a limited IT skill set. The cruise line needed an easy-to-use solution that made it possible to deploy the same code on ship and on shore in order to provide the same experience for all users.

By using D2iQ Konvoy, Royal Caribbean is able to standardize its ship-shore systems footprint, creating dead simple edge clouds with the same operational experience, whether on ship or shore. As a result, the cruise line was able to improve the on-board experience for passengers and unlock new revenue streams. For example, the Royal Caribbean mobile app enhances the customer experience by making services and special offers discoverable and the transaction process easy.

When operating technology systems on the open seas across the globe, being able to respond to inclement weather with confidence is key. Because the service layer underneath the Royal Caribbean mobile application is built on D2iQ Konvoy, the engineering team was able to remotely keep ship-shore systems in sync with real-time, accessible data across multiple origination points and periods of limited connectivity. 

With D2iQ as its technology partner, Royal Caribbean is poised for continued innovation, using cognitive and machine learning to further improve guest services with even more personalized offers and cruise experiences. By reducing the overhead associated with its legacy systems and replacing key components with elastically scalable, resilient architecture with the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform, the global cruise line will be able to continue its investment in innovation.