Celebrity Cruises

An international Cruise Travel Company faced an ongoing challenge: How to know which sailings need additional bookings, and why aren’t they fully booked? Are booking on track with what we should expect? Are our prices set to meet the demand of staterooms of various classes?

These seemingly simple data stories are only answerable by visualizing bookings in multiple ways to make sense of it. A “prototype” Excel document and sketch were provided to me to kick off our initial discussions.

I was very fortunate to have a subject-matter expert in the cruise industry who understood the challenges facing bookings data transparency and analysis. This subject-matter-expert (SME) was a key stakeholder on the project and lead the way when it came to translating user desired outcomes with feasible and real solutions.

Me team interviewed users to understand their needs and pain points. This is how we wrote the crucial questions to answer for users. These questions exposed many data and design problems for the team to solve, to name a few:

1. What is the most intuitive method for selecting a cruise ship’s specific sailing?
2. How to visualize a ship’s bookings when many staterooms are different shapes, sizes, class, and ships have as many as 16 levels?
3. How can we best illuminate whether a ship’s bookings are on track to sell out prior to sailing, or behind schedule?