Ambassador Cruise Line

Having worked in the cruise industry since 2011 with CMV, we know the importance of deadlines and getting to market early in order to sell holidays to Ambassador’s target market. 

Ambassador Cruise Line was a start-up cruise business, backed by a Private Equity investment business, with lofty, ambitious goals. The pressure to deliver was on. We had to launch fast and get early sales. 

In order to hit sales as strongly as possible, a small teaser website was put together, showing off the brand and the upcoming itineraries. This site was linked up with MailChimp to gather data from those people who showed an interest. 

We also helped prepare the customer data and email templates for the marketing team to mail out their mailshots.

In the background, we were working hard on the launch of the full system.

This meant the full marketing website with a booking system backend to manage all bookings that were coming in, via the website (Direct and B2B), phone lines or other methods such as the API.

We only had a few months from the inception of the company and the new brand, Ambassador Cruise Line, to launch day. That big day came around quickly. We knew it was a big ask. We try not to make it a habit of working crazy long hours here at Castus, as we appreciate the work-life balance and know that burnout helps no one. But for this big day, we agreed that we needed to pull out all the stops. It went down to the wire, but with a great team pulling together, we pulled it off. 

As this wasn’t just a marketing website but a fully integrated booking system, we had our specialist team on site at our client’s office, offering that all-important extra support where and when it is needed most. 

The sales on that amazing launch day surpassed all expectations, resulting in millions of pounds of sales. The entire team, both at Castus, Ambassador and the investment board, were all very happy with how that day and, indeed, that first week of sales went. 

A new UK-based cruise line had hit the market, with an amazing brand

We were pleased that we could play our part in that success.

To support the paperless journey, all communications and processes needed to go through the online technology. Whilst this is not necessarily new in travel, we had to bear in mind that the majority of the customer base was generally older and preferred traditional paper-based solutions. We needed to make sure the user journey was exceedingly simple and intuitive. 

We did this by generating multiple versions and user testing them with real people.

Over many sessions, we continually iterated the design of the website and accompanying post-booking area to iron out any confusing sections and improve ease of use. Through this process, we could be confident that the user journey would be clear to understand and support the business's paperless journey goal, without increasing call volumes to the customer service teams. 

Below, you can see some of the work done in preparing the prototypes, which were tested with real users.

Ambassador have recently launched a Caribbean cruise programme. To support this, along with revenue goals, a new feature has been planned, designed and built to both enable the sale of airline seats, but also offer upgrades to the higher seat classes, such as Business or First Class. 

Like many features that we have worked on with Ambassador, whilst working on Fly Cruises, we collaborated with the in-house technology team as well as other departments in the business in order to catch all of the edge cases and ensure we delivered a solution that is efficient and robust.

This is a feature that has been well-received and opens up more possibilities for Ambassador Cruise Line if they choose to operate in other parts of the world. 

Castus were asked to help launch Ambassador Cruise Line, because the leadership knew through working with us in the CMV days that we were trustworthy and we deliver at speed, without compromise. 

We were honoured to be part of the Ambassador journey, right from inception, with Gary Hides supporting in a fractional CTO role, and helping to support the overall customer experience, which starts with the marketing website and initial booking journey. 

With Ambassador being backed by an ambitious private equity business, you can rest assured that we know how to deliver when the pressure is on and results matter. We come with you on the journey. Your goals are our goals. Your success is our success. 

We work with our clients, integrating into their process and taking time to understand the customers, business vision, blockers and the people involved. Our work with Ambassador Cruise Line is a testament to how we can help you move your business forward, enabling scale without the need to scale your workforce along with your customer base.