A mobile app is helping Princess Cruises’ passengers keep up with events on-ship—and helping the company collect a wealth of customer data and feedback.
The Princess@Sea app first launched on one ship in 2013, the Royal Princess, and will be available on all 17 ships in the Princess fleet by the end of the year, said Nate Craddock, project lead and architect for Princess@Sea product team, speaking at Acquia Engage in Boston last week.
On the average cruise where the app is available, 30% to 40% of passengers download the app, and 15% to 20% register to fully use its features, allowing Princess to track users and tabulate that data.
The app, powered by Drupal, allows passengers to create calendars of not only official shipboard events but to create their own personal events with friends, family and travel groups.
Evaluations of on-ship experiences were typically sent via email to passengers after their trip was over in the past. Now, these can be done in real-time via the app, allowing passengers to give their impressions of the ship’s features and services—good and bad—immediately. The speed of this information getting to the crew is increased drastically—results of the email surveys might not get back to the ship for three weeks. And if those emails needed to be translated from another language, it would take even longer. The app offers automatic machine translation, cutting down on the time and effort needed to get feedback to the ship.
In the future, passengers using the mobile app will have the ability to rate and review restaurants and of the features of the ship. This will give passengers more information to make informed choices and give Princess more feedback to improve their offerings, said Craddock.
Many people probably still best remember the 50 year old cruise line best for its starring role on “The Love Boat,” but the cruise line has grown significantly since then. For example, the ship featured on the show—the Pacific Princess—held 600 passengers and had a 300 person crew. A typical cruise ship of today, such as the Regal Princess, holds 3,560 passengers and a crew of 1,346 members.
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