From dreaming about a cruise to booking one.
At Tank Design, I was senior UX designer on Celebrity Cruises’ booking experience in 2019 and 2020: a new way to choose sailings, flights booked inside the cruise flow, a reimagined booking path, and the relaunch of The Retreat suite class.
goal
Celebrity wanted booking a cruise to feel like planning one, not filling in forms. The goals were plain: simplify the flow, make it more conversational, let guests compare total price earlier, and book flights through celebritycruises.com instead of somewhere else.
Celebrity’s own analytics showed the sticking points. On the Review and Pay step, far more guests went back a step or left the site than moved forward. These were design engagements inside a retainer, so I don’t have post-launch conversion numbers to share.
what we did
We started in a workshop with Celebrity’s team in April 2019. We went wide on “how might we” ideas, voted on user value and business value, and agreed on ten measures of success. Four booking scenarios became sketches, then designs, then specs that supported Celebrity’s development sprints.
choosing when to sail
The sailings table shows each ship against the year, with the number of sailings in each month, so a guest sees where the options cluster before picking a date. The date picker covered two ways of thinking, a flexible range or a specific day, on desktop and mobile.
flights inside the cruise flow
Air modernization brought flights into the same path as the cruise. A guest can get a flight quote from the itinerary, see it beside the price, choose perks while customizing the trip, and choose what to pay today at checkout.
reimagining the booking flow
Later in the retainer we looked at the flow end to end. Guests wanted help: those who accepted Celebrity’s recommended room converted at 1.94% against 1.83% for guests who picked their own from the deck plan. We explored three concepts, Concierge, Build Your Vacation and Express Booking, and designed a one-click path that welcomes returning guests back and says plainly when a price or room has changed.
the retreat relaunch
In 2020 Celebrity relaunched The Retreat, its all-suites, all-exclusive, all-included suite class. I designed landing page directions that walk through the sundeck, the lounge, the private restaurant, the amenities and the fleet-wide Celebrity Revolution, so it reads as a whole experience and not a room type.
result
10
measures of success agreed with Celebrity in the air modernization workshop.
4
booking scenarios sketched: combined pricing, separate pricing, cruise first then air, and a flight quote without booking.
3
concepts explored for reimagining the booking flow.
