Holland America Line is a premium cruise line, a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, “with a mission: through excellence, we create once-in-a-lifetime experiences, every time.” Holland has a fleet of 15 elegant ships offering more than 500 sailings a year to all seven continents to both popular and less traveled ports in more than 100 countries.
Holland was looking to provide guests a more tailored and personalized cruise experience by offering extra cruise options like shore excursions and on-board indulgences but presenting the many choices available in a personalized way was challenging. Holland was not using their customer insight and their website effectively.
For example, shore excursions and indulgence options were listed alphabetically and had no relationship with the cruise destination, the guest preferences, or guest history. If a guest was looking for tropical island activities on her sun-filled getaway, an image of an ice mountain climber would be presented on the webpage. Frustrated by the poor online experience in researching and booking cruise enhancement options, guests would abandon the website and wait until they were on-board the cruise to explore the cruise extras.
Holland was missing an opportunity to not only delight their guests with a better online, interactive experience but also to grow revenue and margins by facilitating advance bookings of these cruise enhancements. Analysis also showed that advanced bookings of cruise up-sell and cross-sell options were more cost effective than waiting for these to be booked on-board. Holland had to act.
They chose Oracle Real-Time Decisions to deliver personal, optimized recommendations of shore excursions and on-board indulgences. RTD takes particular excursion and indulgence choices available for content, integrates millions of customer records such as booking history and demographics from Seibel CRM as well as preferences from the Mariner’s Society loyalty program for context for high-velocity marketing.
Then RTD automatically applies a combination of predictive analytics and business rules to optimize which choices a guest is likely to choose and/or which Holland prefers guests to choose for alignment with business strategy. Now guests are segmented by a number of attributes such as age, gender, and cruise experience to receive targeted content, messaging, and imagery in real-time, dynamically on the web for the specific cruise they are taking.
After just nine weeks of implementation and the first month of production, excursion and indulgence revenue was up 14% compared to the control group or status quo proving guests will book the prescribed choices. The self-learning and empirical evidence from RTD also allows Holland to overcome tribal knowledge in challenging assumptions in guests’ interests and what options Holland should be offering. The advance bookings provide benefits to guests by improving the pre-arrival experience. Additionally, Holland enjoys the advance bookings to experiment with promotions and to increase cash flow.
Watch Therron Hofsetz, Director of IT for Holland America Line, tell the story himself.
The RTD approach of automated, self-learning selection of next best marketing offers is critical for organizations such as Holland who do not have the data scientist resources to build and maintain sophisticated statistical models for predictive analytics. Also, RTD combines business rules or policies from the business analysts for guests and Holland to make more informed decisions.
Holland is just getting started with RTD and will be expanding the scope beyond pre-arrival marketing to multiple sales and marketing functions such as original cruise booking and post-departure. Holland will also be expanding the channel that sources and delivers personalized recommendations from the web to multiple channels in email and call-centers, leveraging RTD’s unique enterprise decision management platform. To further optimize the guest online experience for every interaction, “every time”, Holland will be adding Oracle’s WebCenter Sites to create and manage websites.