Royal Caribbean: Helping customers get the most relevant information with Google's Data Cloud
About Royal Caribbean
Royal Caribbean International is a global cruise holding company operating a global fleet of 60 ships traveling to more than 800 destinations worldwide.
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About Direcly
Direcly is a Google Marketing Platform and Google Cloud partner who is passionate about using innovative technology to solve business challenges.
As the cruise industry stalled in 2020, Royal Caribbean worked with Direcly and Google Cloud to re-architect its marketing and analytics data, innovating its operations to navigate a different world.
Google Cloud results
- Reports that used to take two weeks to process now take less than five minutes
- Return on ad spend increased by 30% year over year
- Costs per booking went down by 20%, as costs per click decreased by 34%
3X increase in website conversions
Royal Caribbean International is known for innovation and has redefined cruise holidays since its launch in 1969, from award-winning world class dining and spectacular entertainment, to record-setting onboard thrills. Behind the scenes, a team of business and technology experts came together in 2019 to push the envelope of what's possible for the company from a data and analytics standpoint.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, travel decreased significantly. Global revenue from the travel and tourism industry is estimated to have decreased by more than 40% compared to the previous year. To navigate these challenging times, Royal Caribbean worked with technology partner Direcly to implement Google Marketing Platform and remove barriers between the company and its data using Data Cloud.
"Given the state of the world, we needed an agile marketing stack, and that's where Google Cloud came in."
—Chad Grospe, AVP International Marketing, Royal Caribbean International.Journeying towards the unknown with confidence and marketing data
The process started with Royal Caribbean Mexico, which lacked a centralized measurement tool for its marketing strategies and used different demand-side platforms. This resulted in a fragmented marketing ecosystem. The first goal was to unify everything in a single demand-side-platform with Display & Video 360, part of Google Marketing Platform. This helped Royal Caribbean better activate and measure its digital advertising performance while adapting to dynamic market conditions.
Typical media plans aren't necessarily appropriate at all times, particularly against the backdrop of a global pandemic. Using Display & Video 360, Royal Caribbean gained control of its campaigns with an updated view of what's changing so it could effectively reassess its media plans and deliver more relevant digital experiences. "Given the state of the world, we needed an agile marketing stack, and that's where Google Cloud came in," explains Chad Grospe, Associate Vice President, International Marketing at Royal Caribbean International.
The results in Mexico were a three-fold increase in site conversion compared to pre-2019. The success of this test was noticed within the company, and 19 other Royal Caribbean international offices subsequently deployed the same strategy.
"Working with Google Cloud really unlocked a lot of data that we can use to build models, build better segmentation, and be smarter about marketing. We were kind of shocked to see the increase in conversion rate, which spoke to the fact that we could get to customers on a digital level a lot quicker than we were before," says Grospe.
Unifying global marketing and business data into BigQuery
The next step was to unify the company's business and marketing data on a global scale to optimize decisions during the pandemic and beyond. With support from Direcly, Chad selected BigQuery as the international marketing team's new cloud data warehouse.
"We thought: let's unify everything into BigQuery to better visualize and provoke actions that can have a greater impact on media investment internationally," explains Francisco Garcia, Founder at Direcly. "This was a solution to the challenge of operating in silos as much as it was a new opportunity to aim for the next level of data sophistication across the board."
With BigQuery in place, one of the first tasks was to bring in new datasets that were now more important for marketing decisions, such as data from governments on COVID-19 and flight data. This data gave the marketing team a new way of looking at the customer and allowed them to be more agile in deciding where best to allocate marketing budgets and resources.
The next step was to bring data together from a multitude of sources, including Google Ads, Search Ads 360, Display & Video 360, Facebook, and other marketing and analytics platforms. "The point was to empower and accelerate better marketing decisions by using all these disparate data sources to answer questions such as: What's working? What should change? What's the most efficient way to allocate investment to generate the highest possible return on ad spend?" explains Garcia.
Using BigQuery to consolidate marketing data felt like a natural progression towards strengthening the company's analytics and AI capabilities. Royal Caribbean is now working on marketing models to understand what should be the best investment towards specific channels to maximize return on ad spend.
Meanwhile, some ongoing machine learning projects are contributing towards operational efficiency, such as translating Google Search ad copy to 17 different languages. "Next, we want to connect more data sources into Google Cloud and use machine learning models to better anticipate and meet the changing needs of our customers. Leveraging our first-party data makes us more agile, and Google Cloud helps to enable this," says Grospe.
"One satisfying result is seeing the marketing team gain autonomy to catch issues in real-time and take measures to fix problems faster. Using Looker, they're able to answer their own questions straight away, versus having to request data from a platform then waiting for an agency to interpret it."
—Francisco Garcia, Founder, DireclySurfacing insights with Looker to inspire positive action and results
To make all this possible, Direcly tapped into its proprietary APIs and built custom pipelines for Royal Caribbean to ingest its global data from different sources to be processed and stored into BigQuery. Business users and analysts are using Looker to turn all those data sources and signals into value. Real-time marketing and business data is made accessible to their non-technical users to monitor dashboards or perform ad hoc analysis to answer new questions. The combination of real-time data and self-service has increased the speed at which Royal Caribbean can respond to business changes.
"One satisfying result is seeing the marketing team gain autonomy to catch issues in real-time and take measures to fix problems faster. Using Looker, they're able to answer their own questions straight away, versus having to request data from a platform then waiting for an agency to interpret it," says Garcia.
Because of the real-time data capabilities of Looker and BigQuery, this has been an especially powerful combination for understanding and working with dynamically changing COVID-19 data with their ever changing business data. The company uses Looker to include COVID-19 travel alerts into reports that help the business understand how it is performing across different markets and online marketing channels.
Royal Caribbean is now able to gather and understand marketing data such as conversions, website activity, past revenue, and number of active users, to better understand the end user itself. As a result, Royal Caribbean has seen its return on ad spend increase by 30% year on year. And costs per booking went down by 20%, as costs per click decreased by 34%. These reports that used to take up to two weeks now take less than five minutes.
Using Google Cloud marketing and analytics capabilities, the company is better personalizing its messaging and brand experience to all of its current and potential customers. As a result, "the investments we made with Google Cloud are now driving the world's largest cruise lines' return to service not just in one market but around the globe," says Grospe. "From how we view our customers to how we invest marketing dollars, Google Cloud helped us transform and dramatically increase our direct-to-consumer business," he concludes.
"The investments we made with Google Cloud are now driving the world's largest cruise lines' return to service not just in one market but around the globe. From how we view our customers to how we invest marketing dollars, Google Cloud helped us transform and dramatically increase our direct-to-consumer business."
—Chad Grospe, AVP International Marketing, Royal Caribbean International.Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Royal Caribbean
Royal Caribbean International is a global cruise holding company operating a global fleet of 60 ships traveling to more than 800 destinations worldwide.
About Direcly
Direcly is a Google Marketing Platform and Google Cloud partner who is passionate about using innovative technology to solve business challenges.