Frictionless Arrival: Royal caribbean’s transformational Embarkation Experience

Challenge

Royal Caribbean, known for their commitment to experience design, faced a significant pain point in their guest journey: the embarkation process. Despite the excitement of starting a cruise vacation, guests had to endure a grueling 90-minute boarding process, which could take days to recover from. Our challenge was to create a frictionless arrival experience, allowing guests to get from "car-to-bar" in less than 10 minutes, while maintaining the critical accuracy of the ship manifest for international customs.As the Product Strategy lead, I was tasked with:

Reducing ship embarkation time from 90 minutes to under 10 minutes
Ensuring 100% accuracy in guest verification for customs purposes
Integrating new technologies like VR, facial recognition, Apple Watch, and beacons
Designing a solution that could be implemented across global ports

What I Did

Leading a team of 3 engineers, 2 designers, and 2 product managers, I spearheaded the following actions:

Discovery and Research:

Analyzed each step of the current embarkation process
Identified pain points, data requirements, and time spent at each step
Facilitated a creative workshop to redesign the physical experience

Ideation and Design:

Used diverge-and-converge collaboration methods to generate innovative solutions
Created multiple prototype iterations including mobile apps, motion graphics, iPad apps, kiosk experiences, and service blueprints
Developed interaction designs, UI designs, information designs, and motion designs

Technology Integration:

Implemented facial recognition, beacons, iOS (Swift), Ruby on Rails, Angular, and Python
Determined correct technical solutions for hardware cameras and facial recognition software

Testing and Refinement:

Designed a sophisticated fall-back system using multiple cameras and facial recognition systems
Improved system effectiveness when initial viability was questioned

Implementation and Handoff:

Carefully crafted handoff materials for the internal Royal Caribbean team
Supported the rollout across multiple global ports

Outcome

Our efforts resulted in a transformative embarkation experience:

Reduced embarkation time from 90 minutes to just 3 minutes
Achieved 95% effectiveness in facial recognition at a major press event
Successfully implemented the Frictionless Arrival system in multiple global ports, including the flagship Miami port
Maintained accuracy of ship manifest for customs purposes while dramatically improving guest experience

“As Far as we’re concerned, it couldn’t have gone any better.”
– Joey Hasty, Royal Caribbean Head of Innovation