Carnival Corp's edge computing could change the face of the travel industry

Can intelligence-led service introduce cruise travel to a younger generation?

Two decades into the 21st century, using customer data to improve future service is old hat. But what happens when you want to use that information to improve your performance then and there - in real time? That's the challenge Carnival Cruise Line faced, and where edge computing comes into play.

Carnival launched a proprietary IoT device called the Ocean Medallion on three of its Princess Line ships last year, and added two more by the end of 2019. The device is a coin-sized wearable that tracks guests around the ship, and through which they can interact with certain devices - like their room doors, which unlock automatically when they approach - using NFC and Bluetooth. But the Medallion goes beyond basic convenience, to make the entire holiday a connected experience.

Carnival fitted an embedded network in the ships trialling the Medallion, which will eventually be part of every one of the company's ships will feature it. John Padgett, chief experience and innovation officer at Carnival, says that continual connection is key in building a relationship with guests.

"The reason why we built the xIoT, as I call it - experiential IoT - is...a point that many miss, which is this: it is that to truly personalise a guest experience on the edge [of the network], or in the middle of the ocean, and on a ship, they have to be persistently connected to you. And that persistent connection can only occur through an embedded network… To create a relationship with the guests, we need to process all of that information and intelligence on the edge so we can invest back in the guest experience in real time."

Padgett sees the traditional use of data, which only has an effect in the long-term, as a legacy approach. He told us "I kind of reject those terms [of big data and business intelligence]. They may help the next consumer, but we're all about helping the guests on this current vacation; so if they're going to connect with me to create intelligence, they deserve the benefit from the intelligence they create."

Issuing every guest with a Medallion means that they can benefit from this persistent connectivity - but aren't there concerns about privacy? Not according to Padgett, who says that in addition to guests needing to opt in, there's also nothing to hack: each Medallion features the guest's name, sail date and ship name for embarking/disembarking purposes. Everything else, like the wearer's location - tracked by any of the 7,000+ sensors around the ship - is transmitted as an encrypted number, which he calls a guest's "licence plate."

Moving to the edge

Processing data on devices, rather than transferring it to a data centre, bring advantages in speed, cost and bandwidth. Because a ship might not be in range of shore-side data processing facilities for days or weeks at a time, Carnival treats the entire vessel as the edge of the network, using technology from Couchbase to store and process passenger data on-board. "That keeps everything real time," says Padgett "and also minimises the transmission of information you don't need to transmit."

"When the ship is in Glacier Bay, we need to be computing all that information in Alaska, we need to be computing all that information on the edge, because even [with] the best satellites in the world that we employ, still taking that information shore-side, processing and delivering it back and to be able to do it right every single time: that is something that is still - from a physics standpoint - virtually impossible. So we needed to have the capability to do all the compute on the edge, as well as maintain cloud connectivity and processing whenever it's available."

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are fully capable of processing data themselves, but guests on a cruise ship often want to move around without them - preferring to leave them in their rooms for security, or just to switch off from the outside world. In addition, the fragmented mobile ecosystem makes adopting a similar model to that of the Medallion difficult.

Using the IoT, however, "Everyone can participate [and] we can transform our total operation. That's very different from a technical model where 5 per cent, 10 per cent, maybe 20 per cent of your consumers are using your mobile device with the right configuration to participate in some kind of connected experience. Since we extract all that complication out of the equation, all of our guests, whether they're four years old or 94 years old, can participate in the fully connected experience at no cost."

Sailing to the future

The feedback among Carnival's guests has so far been resoundingly positive, but it is still to be seen if the investment will bring in new customers.

Cruises tend to target guests ‘of a certain age', and the travel industry as a whole is led by historic precedents and business models. Bringing technology like the Ocean Medallion on-board to disrupt traditional ways of interacting with customers could attract a new, younger clientele, who value personalisation and intelligence-led service delivery.

"No one's ever made the link between matching the demand for service specifically with the supply [of] a service, and matching those up with intelligence," says Padgett. "Because if you can do that you can create much more effective service delivery and add so much more value to the consumer. And so that's why we think it's so interesting for this application."

He adds, "Any time you inject intelligence into an industry in a way that you've never done before, your capabilities just increase exponentially, or the consumer gets a much greater experience, and so that's really the frontier we're on. I can just tell you that we're barely scratching the surface of the potential there."