Royal Caribbean Group stands as a titan in the travel industry, managing a global fleet of dozens of ships across iconic brands like Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, and Silversea Cruises. As a leader in delivering unforgettable vacation experiences, their digital presence is the critical first port of call for millions of customers worldwide.
Challenges
In a competitive market where digital excellence is paramount, Royal Caribbean Group’s existing online booking engine was becoming an anchor, not an engine for growth. The platform’s monolithic architecture was complex and rigid, making it difficult and time-consuming to introduce new features, optimize the user experience, or adapt to evolving business needs.
The system’s limitations created several significant business challenges:
- Slow time-to-market: Each cruise line operated on its own codebase, forcing the company to build and launch new features multiple times— also driving up costs.
- Hindered Innovation: Years of accumulated complexity made it difficult to quickly adapt to changing customer expectations or launch new booking experiences, limiting the company’s ability to differentiate in a competitive market.
- Missed Opportunities for Modernization: Reliance on legacy systems prevented the business from taking full advantage of the latest digital innovations, putting customer experience and growth potential at risk.
Royal Caribbean Group needed more than a simple update; they needed to re-architect their core digital sales channel to be faster, more flexible, and ready for the future.
Solution
Makai Digital partnered with Royal Caribbean Group to spearhead the modernization of their booking funnel. Our approach was not just to replace the old technology, but to implement a new platform and a new way of working that would empower their teams and accelerate growth for years to come.
Together, we engineered a new, multi-brand booking platform built on a modern, decoupled architecture. We strategically broke down the complex booking process into smaller, independent verticals: Room Selection and Checkout.
This approach fundamentally transformed their development capabilities:
- Empowering Parallel Innovation: Autonomous teams could now take full ownership of individual components, allowing them to develop, test, and deploy new features simultaneously without disrupting the entire system.
- Building a Multi-Brand Foundation: The new architecture was designed from the ground up to support multiple brands on a single, scalable foundation. This allows for shared efficiencies while enabling each brand to deliver a unique and customized user experience.
- Prioritizing Performance: By leveraging a modern tech stack focused on performance, we delivered a lightning-fast, intuitive user experience, ensuring the front-end was as robust and reliable as the back-end infrastructure.
Impact
The collaboration between Makai Digital and Royal Caribbean Group successfully launched a state-of-the-art booking platform that directly addressed their core business challenges and positioned them for future success.
The new platform delivered transformative results:
- Drastically Increased Development Velocity: The new agile structure allows Royal Caribbean Group to bring new features and optimizations to market faster than ever before.
- A Superior, High-Performance User Experience: Customers now enjoy a seamless and responsive booking process, leading to higher satisfaction and improved conversion rates.
- A Future-Proof, Scalable Platform: The modern, cloud-native architecture provides a stable and extensible foundation ready to support Royal Caribbean Group’s global expansion and future digital initiatives.
This strategic overhaul did more than just modernize a website; it transformed a critical revenue channel into a powerful engine for innovation and growth.
Is your technology platform ready to power your company's future?
Legacy systems can create friction for your customers and barriers for your teams. At Makai Digital, we partner with enterprise leaders to build world-class digital platforms that unlock agility, drive revenue, and create meaningful impact.
Contact us today at hi@makaihq.com to learn how we can help you navigate your digital transformation.