Case Study: Business Intelligence in the Middle of the Ocean
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Achieves Onboard Analytics With Retail BI Solution That Maximizes Performance of In-Voyage Revenue
About Royal Caribbean
Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. is the world’s second largest cruise vacation company that operates Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, Pullmantur Cruises, Azamara Cruises, and CDF Croisières de France. The company currently has 40 ships in service that call on approximately 400 worldwide destinations.
Business Drivers
There were two main business drivers for Royal Caribbean:
- Increase access to data
- Better manage the business
Key personnel were provided limited ability to make actionable decisions to affect onboard revenue during a voyage. There was no visibility to detailed guest level transactions. Data resided onboard each individual vessel without a consolidated view of the fleet. Most importantly, because of existing architecture, the summary-level voyage information could only be collected at the end of each voyage. The company did not know how well a particular voyage was performing against targets until they returned to port and all the passengers departed. This was too late to affect change to in-voyage revenue.
Top executives sought the ability to better manage the business and grow voyage revenue by better understanding relationships between guest’s demographics and their spending patterns. For example, on a given voyage, what country are our passengers from and, based on historical data, what are they most likely to consume in the form of food & beverage, on-board activities and on-shore excursions.
The management teams needed a tool to quickly identify revenue performance trends during these 3-10 day voyages and make associated changes to drive revenue instead of just reporting on it.
