GenAI guides guests to dream cruise vacations

As a leader in the cruise industry, with an award-winning fleet of 32 ships and over 450 travel destinations, Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) has been innovating for over 57 years to help people vacation better and experience more. 

However, cruise lines face a pervasive, industry-wide challenge: the process of booking a cruise is innately complex, especially for guests who have never set sail before. With so many different ports, ships, and itineraries to choose from, it takes up to 64 considerations before someone books a cruise. From the moment of their first consideration, it also takes up to 18 months before a guest embarks on their actual voyage.  

Recognizing this complex digital journey, NCL partnered with Slalom’s AI consulting experts to embrace advancements in technology and eliminate the overwhelming array of decisions that guests face when planning their dream vacations.  

Our teams kicked off with a four-week innovation sprint to iterate through solutions that could simplify the cruise-booking process. In this short time frame, we developed a prototype of a digital itinerary search assistant. Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and AWS, this prototype demonstrated that generative AI (GenAI) can significantly enhance the cruise-planning experience, offering guests insights and answers in ways that surpass traditional web-browsing capabilities—even without tailored customization or direct data integration. 

With our destination clearly in sight, we were ready to mobilize. As Dylan Brock, senior director of digital product design and innovation at NCL, explains, “There’s a big difference between creating a proof of concept and putting something into production. So we looked to Slalom to say: ‘You’ve started this great work. Now let’s execute it.’”  

For example, a guest could ask Nora, “Can you recommend a family-friendly cruise with lots of shore excursions at a low price?” and Nora will deliver personalized vacation options that fit their exact criteria. 

Beyond itinerary planning, Nora can also answer customer service questions through conversational language and human-like guidance. Whether a guest needs to know the best time to board their cruise or an NCL employee seeks information to assist a guest quickly, Nora is equipped with the answers to create a more informed consumer.

“With Slalom, we get a company that can always bring the right skill sets to the table. Slalom understands our product, our guests, and the pain points our guests face to help us realize solutions,” says Scott Friedman, vice president of digital experience at NCL. Now live and available to NCL’s website visitors across the United States, Nora has significantly reduced the complexity guests face when planning a cruise. Additionally, Nora will continue to serve as a powerful data source for NCL, allowing the cruise line to gain deeper insights into guest preferences to boost ongoing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

As we look toward the future, the foundational building blocks are now in place for NCL to scale Nora’s technology even further, evolving the assistant into an end-to-end digital vacation companion that can help with all aspects of planning, answering questions, excursions, restaurant reservations, and more.   

Kellay Buckelew, chief digital experience officer, concludes, “I believe the future is incredibly bright for the digital experience journey we are building to support our guests, our employees, our travel partners, and our crew. Nora is going to play an incredibly impactful and important part in supporting this journey moving forward. And it all started from a conversation with our trusted partner Slalom.”