Today’s consumers are constantly tethered to their smartphones, and they expect companies to provide highly personalized experiences 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 to reduce travel friction and frustrations and allow 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 systems — 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 skillset. The cruise line needed an easy-to-use solution that made it possible to deploy the same code on ship and onshore to provide the same experience for all users.

Royal Caribbean standardized its on-ship and shoreside systems footprint using the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP), creating dead simple edge clouds with the same operational experience, whether on-ship or on-shore corporate datacenters powered by AWS. As a result, the cruise line improved passengers' onboard experience and unlocked new revenue streams. For example, the Royal Caribbean mobile application enhances the customer experience by making services and special offers discoverable and the transaction process easy.

When operating technology systems on the open seas globally, responding to inclement weather with confidence is critical. Because the service layer underneath the Royal Caribbean mobile application is deployed on DKP, the engineering team could 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 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.