Project Ruby also feeds its insights to crew, augmenting their professional experience with the power of AI. The assistance tool helps crew feel more confident by answering questions quickly and tailoring responses to their ship, route, and role. Complicated backend tasks are handled behind the scenes, such as rescheduling or refunding excursions during inclement weather, so that crew can focus on interacting with guests instead of grappling with systems. Servers at a restaurant receive notes about a sailor's birthday, shellfish allergy, or preference for red wine, enabling them to effortlessly provide topnotch services.

Virgin Voyages continues to embed AI across the business to improve productivity, reach more customers at scale, and find new ways to make every sailor feel special. Today, more than 1,500 AI agents built on Gemini support everything from managing group bookings to training crew members to engaging potential sailors.

For instance, Email Ellie is the company's AI communications marketing assistant that writes personalized email campaigns in the Virgin Voyages brand voice. The agent sped up campaign timelines from weeks to days, reduced agency costs by 35%, and contributed to record-breaking sales with a 28% year-over-year increase.

Virgin Voyages uses not only Gemini models' sophisticated reasoning, but also the text-to-video capabilities in Veo and a text-to-image workflow with Imagen to create a test for its "Postcards From Your Future Self" campaign, due to roll out this year. The initiative creates hyper-personalized ads and emails for thousands of sailors, allowing the cruise line to engage guests at scale in a way that would not have been impossible a year ago.

"Our AI foundation supported by Google Cloud can scale easily with us across the Virgin ecosystem. It's an intelligence layer that supports our goals and growth," says Chinique. "Five years from now when we look back at the big changes in the hospitality industry, this is the moment we'll point to."