Why doesn't Cunard have a proper mobile app?

[reeves35]

Am I right in saying Cunard doesn't have a mobile phone app but instead just has the My Voyage mobile accessible webpage which has some but not all of the features of a proper app?  I think P&O UK is the same with its My Holiday webpage.

 

I don't understand why both don't have proper apps already.  They are part of the global Carnival Corp and many of its brands including Carnival, Holland America and P&O Australia all already have proper apps.  It surely can't be too hard to re-skin any of these apps and get up and running in the short to medium term.  Does anyone have any insight as to why they have not done so as yet?

[3rdGenCunarder]

Be careful what you wish for. It took about a year to get the bugs out of HAL's Navigator app.

[tjunmin]

1 hour ago, reeves35 said:

Does anyone have any insight as to why they have not done so as yet?

As an outsider, with no insight into their business practices and IT infrastructure, it is difficult to say.

 

At an extremely high level, this is my best guess.

 

When a corporation undertakes a project, usually there is a business case to justify the underlying cost. In the case of a cruise ship mobile app, if I were working on such business case, I'd be looking into how tracking passengers and creating analytics would assist me determining how to increase profitability on board. For instance, when passengers scroll through the daily program, which free/paid events are attracting the most interest, and how many people actually sign up for the paid ones? In regards to paid restaurants, which are the ones that people are most interested and checking their menus, when does that happen, and how many of those people actually book a reservation? You can cross-reference the data collected to find out all sort of patterns across ships/itineraries/passenger demographics/time and so on. On a separate front, using tracking technology, such as wi-fi, it is possible to track passenger location onboard and collect all sort of data about how passengers spend their time on the ship, including where they go and how long they spend in different venues, which in turn can be used in a wide range of ways, from understanding passenger behavior, to deciding how to update venues or implement new features. On land, stores have been using such technologies for a long time; just check "in-store analytics" to learn more about it.

 

In order to implement such solution, investments are most likely required not only on the mobile app, but also on the ship IT infrastructure. It is up to the business to perform the cost/benefit analysis to determine if it is worth going ahead with a mobile app for Cunard or not.

 

Since other Carnival brands already have a mobile app in use, it will help reduce the implementation cost to reuse the underlying code for Cunard. First, I imagine that Cunard will have to consider the cost to make any adjustments to the IT infrastructure on board. Second, I imagine that middle and upper management at Cunard probably have their own KPIs, which in turn means that the analytics created for other Carnival brands might not necessarily fit perfectly for Cunard needs and will need to be adjusted, which again means additional cost to the project

 

Hope this makes sense to most people, and sorry if I bored anyone with my TED talk. ;-)

I worked in IT before I retired; business cases were part of my work; implementation of complex IT solutions was another aspect. But I never worked with cruise companies, so my guesses might be out of line.

Edited January 22 by tjunmin

[rog747]

IMHO I think that once, and perhaps this may still apply to this day,

many Cunard Pax are not the type of folk that live all-day on their phones and would want to access everything on Apps.

However,

todays Boomers (of which I am one hehe) are of course much more Tech Savvy, but I do believe Cunard has purposely not gone that way (yet).
I for one, can cope with ordering my bar cocktails by calling over the very nice waiter or waitress and asking for what I want, or I would rather pop down to the Tours Desk to book my Excursions. 

TUI Holidays (who was until last year the UK's No.1 Tour Operator) have an App for Bookings, My Bookings, and getting holiday extras, I do use it, but it's clunky and often crashes.
Once opened on your phone the TUI App then diverts you to a Webpage on your Browser.

Notwithstanding that, yes many folk today would may now like to have an App.
Perhaps a Cruise Critic Poll on the subject would give us an idea if Cunard Guests want an App or not?

[tacticalbanjo]

From the outside it seems like the big thing is that it costs money. The other major thing is that Carnival Corp appeared to have allowed each brand to do its own thing IT wise rather than just having one system that works across all brands. So deploying one app across all brands isn't possible unless they spend even more money on harmonising both shore side and ship side IT operations. I doubt the bean counters think that is worth it even if it might reduce ongoing costs.

 

I'd like to see something like Princess's solution across all brands. I was impressed by it when I tried Princess last year although it does have it's bugs too. But having an app shouldn't mean a reduction in staffing or forcing everyone to go down the app route if they don't want to. But I'd love to be able to order a drink from any sun lounger and have it find me without having to wait someone to come and take my order. 

 

And if they could allow you to use your phone or smartwatch as a cruise card, that would be ideal! 

[david63]

33 minutes ago, tacticalbanjo said:

The other major thing is that Carnival Corp appeared to have allowed each brand to do its own thing IT wise rather than just having one system that works across all brands

That is probably quite deliberate to create brand identity. If all Carnival brands had the Princess Medallion then it would cease to be unique - although I believe that the original intention was to roll it our across other brands, so much so that I was told some of the newer Carnival brands ship have the cabling installed.

[tacticalbanjo]

39 minutes ago, david63 said:

That is probably quite deliberate to create brand identity. If all Carnival brands had the Princess Medallion then it would cease to be unique - although I believe that the original intention was to roll it our across other brands, so much so that I was told some of the newer Carnival brands ship have the cabling installed.

Even if they didn't roll out the medallion to all brands, having just one app with features enabled and disabled depending on brand probably would have been cheaper than rolling out a bunch of different apps and having to test and support each of them separately. But not if you already have as many different back end systems as brands!

 

I doubt that the current stage of technology was ever envisioned when some of these ships were fitted out and now it's going to be expensive to harmonise even if it would save costs in maintenance and improvements simply because you don't have to pay for the same thing a bunch of times. 

[majortom10]

1 hour ago, tacticalbanjo said:

From the outside it seems like the big thing is that it costs money. The other major thing is that Carnival Corp appeared to have allowed each brand to do its own thing IT wise rather than just having one system that works across all brands. So deploying one app across all brands isn't possible unless they spend even more money on harmonising both shore side and ship side IT operations. I doubt the bean counters think that is worth it even if it might reduce ongoing costs.

 

I'd like to see something like Princess's solution across all brands. I was impressed by it when I tried Princess last year although it does have it's bugs too. But having an app shouldn't mean a reduction in staffing or forcing everyone to go down the app route if they don't want to. But I'd love to be able to order a drink from any sun lounger and have it find me without having to wait someone to come and take my order. 

 

And if they could allow you to use your phone or smartwatch as a cruise card, that would be ideal! 

We first used Princess App before COVID in 2019 and there were many issues, faults and bugs. Still doesn't seem to be totally effective so personally think it is a step too far for Cunard.  With regards sitting on a sun lounger requesting a drink has never really worked. We used to lie on deck and order a drink then watch the waiter wander around ages with our drinks because it was never very accurate. Used to end up shouting or waving arms to the waiter. In its early days you couldn't use app to order 2 drinks one for yourself and one for wife even with drinks package because it automatically charged your account for second drink. So we both had to order individually on each smartphone and then the drinks would never be delivered together sometimes a long time between delivery of each drink.

Edited January 22 by majortom10

[3rdGenCunarder]

2 hours ago, david63 said:

That is probably quite deliberate to create brand identity. If all Carnival brands had the Princess Medallion then it would cease to be unique - although I believe that the original intention was to roll it our across other brands, so much so that I was told some of the newer Carnival brands ship have the cabling installed.

 

Nooo, please no. I do not want to wear a medallion. I refuse to wear my keycard on a lanyard. I did that at work, and I'm retired. No more lanyards!!!

 

I'm a boomer and tech-savvy, so I would use an app, depending on what it offers. I have used HAL's Navigator app, and now that it's been around for maybe 2 years, it has functions I find useful. The daily program (not that HAL has much going on during the day) is listed and, IIRC, you can set alerts for things you want to attend. Best use is menus, especially on their larger ships. I can see what's for lunch in the Lido and know in advance which stations I want to go to instead of wandering around like a lost soul to see what's on offer (are you reading this, QM2????). I can check the deserts and know if I should go there first before they run out of opera cake. 

 

The Navigator lets you book tours (and I think, also cancel). You can check your account balance without having to stand in line at the front desk. (Does anyone remember when QM2 was new and you could do this through your TV and the keyboard in the desk?) 

 

All of the uses I've described take a minute or two, and then I put the phone away. I don't think an app would make people be on their phones all the time. That's more a matter of how addicted you are--and starlink will enable that addiction, app or no. 

[Belle1990]

5 hours ago, tacticalbanjo said:

From the outside it seems like the big thing is that it costs money. The other major thing is that Carnival Corp appeared to have allowed each brand to do its own thing IT wise rather than just having one system that works across all brands. So deploying one app across all brands isn't possible unless they spend even more money on harmonising both shore side and ship side IT operations. I doubt the bean counters think that is worth it even if it might reduce ongoing costs.

 

I'd like to see something like Princess's solution across all brands. I was impressed by it when I tried Princess last year although it does have it's bugs too. But having an app shouldn't mean a reduction in staffing or forcing everyone to go down the app route if they don't want to. But I'd love to be able to order a drink from any sun lounger and have it find me without having to wait someone to come and take my order. 

 

And if they could allow you to use your phone or smartwatch as a cruise card, that would be ideal! 

I agree with you. I was on a Princess cruise last month and loved the convince of the app and medallion. I'm a boomer and love any tech I can get. While on the QM2 in 2022 I was so frustrated with the slow internet and internal app.

[tigerfan75]

Although tech savvy, PLEASE no app.  I want to holiday, not carry and use a phone.  Everyone is different, just that I hope Cunard delays going in that direction…

[D&N]

Since we were on board QM2 in June 2022 Starlink has been introduced and the daily program is now available on My Voyage. I don't expect Starlink to be perfect but it seems to have reasonable coverage on the North Atlantic, which is all we need. It might be handy if our lunch and dinner menus were on My Voyage but we didn't find it a problem choosing at the table. Our waiters usually had the dinner menu for us at lunchtime, so we could have taken photos of them.

 

I can't think of any other uses we would want from a proper app. We don't want drinks to follow us around the ship. We don't want the cabin door to open as we approach. We don't need to find each other, we're never more than a few yards apart.

 

We do carry my phone around. It acts as a hub that backs up pics from the camera and in turn copies them to a cloud drive, and lets me access anything I would normally get on my home desktop and post social media and anything else internet related.

 

 

 

[tacticalbanjo]

I’ve remembered something else I liked about the Princess app. I could buy photos in the app and download them directly to my phone. On Cunard the only option was a USB stick which none of my devices take because they’re all USB C. So I couldn’t even check the stick before I got off to make sure it worked correctly. 
 

I’m definitely not saying that the Princess app is bug free or that it should be mandatory but it would be nice to have some smarter options available for those who want them. I know the remote door opening is much mocked on here but I often wear clothes without pockets and I’m not joined to my husband at the hip so being able to wear a medallion on my wrist made my life so much easier. I could deposit him at a bar and head off for activities that suited me without having to carry my card and worry about losing it. 

[D&N]

It would be useful to access photos on My Voyage. We agree a voyage price for all photos taken at start. It would be nice to download them as we go along rather than waiting until end.

 

 

[3rdGenCunarder]

26 minutes ago, tacticalbanjo said:

I’ve remembered something else I liked about the Princess app. I could buy photos in the app and download them directly to my phone. On Cunard the only option was a USB stick which none of my devices take because they’re all USB C. So I couldn’t even check the stick before I got off to make sure it worked correctly. 
 

I’m definitely not saying that the Princess app is bug free or that it should be mandatory but it would be nice to have some smarter options available for those who want them. I know the remote door opening is much mocked on here but I often wear clothes without pockets and I’m not joined to my husband at the hip so being able to wear a medallion on my wrist made my life so much easier. I could deposit him at a bar and head off for activities that suited me without having to carry my card and worry about losing it. 

 

Any time I've bought pictures on a memory stick, the photographer tested it in his/her computer so that I would know that it worked and so I could be sure I got the photos I chose. 

 

It gets a little warm, but I can always manage to carry my keycard when I don't have pockets. 😉

[david63]

1 hour ago, tacticalbanjo said:

On Cunard the only option was a USB stick which none of my devices take because they’re all USB C. So I couldn’t even check the stick before I got off to make sure it worked correctly. 

Amazon have many adaptors for just a pound or two!

[new to cuising]

Given the difficulties many passengers had setting the time on their device as we lost an hour (on five days) during an eastbound TA I think an app on Cunard Line would not be well received by many.

[gapiro]

16 hours ago, tacticalbanjo said:

From the outside it seems like the big thing is that it costs money. The other major thing is that Carnival Corp appeared to have allowed each brand to do its own thing IT wise rather than just having one system that works across all brands. So deploying one app across all brands isn't possible unless they spend even more money on harmonising both shore side and ship side IT operations. I doubt the bean counters think that is worth it even if it might reduce ongoing costs.

 

I'd like to see something like Princess's solution across all brands. I was impressed by it when I tried Princess last year although it does have it's bugs too. But having an app shouldn't mean a reduction in staffing or forcing everyone to go down the app route if they don't want to. But I'd love to be able to order a drink from any sun lounger and have it find me without having to wait someone to come and take my order. 

 

And if they could allow you to use your phone or smartwatch as a cruise card, that would be ideal! 

Yeah I think the cost of doing an app like this is going to be way underestimated. You’re talking at least into a ten million mark for simple stuff. To connect it into the cruise card system and such is going to be huge amounts of work 

add in that if you’re doing this for on board reasons you need servers locally on the ship caching data. 

[WantedOnVoyage]

Maybe Cunard would be wiser to offer an "device detox" cruise experience.... sounds like its needed for some.

 

Surely it is possible to actually travel in a ship for a few weeks without interacting with a piece of plastic let alone aspiring that one cannot get into one's cabin without it, be given an actual menu card and a printed daily programme without it.  

 

Enough!

[3rdGenCunarder]

41 minutes ago, WantedOnVoyage said:

Maybe Cunard would be wiser to offer an "device detox" cruise experience.... sounds like its needed for some.

 

Surely it is possible to actually travel in a ship for a few weeks without interacting with a piece of plastic let alone aspiring that one cannot get into one's cabin without it, be given an actual menu card and a printed daily programme without it.  

 

Enough!

 

How ever did we survive before the internet?????? 

 

It would be good for people to try a "device detox," perhaps in small steps, not all the time. I realize that many people have serious reasons to stay in touch, but it doesn't need to be 24/7. It's a vacation, be mindful of other options. I've often seen people on a Caribbean cruise, sitting near a window by the pool or in a bar and not looking out at the beautiful ocean and the brilliant blue sky, just staring at the little screen. 

 

 

[TowandaUK]

I am only able to cruise once a year. The time onboard is valuable to me and I always want to make the most of every minute. Any way to access information to help me plan my time is very welcome. I have found an app to be very useful on another line. 

[exlondoner]

1 minute ago, TowandaUK said:

I am only able to cruise once a year. The time onboard is valuable to me and I always want to make the most of every minute. Any way to access information to help me plan my time is very welcome. I have found an app to be very useful on another line. 

The Daily Programme arrives the night before. What can be more convenient than that?

[TowandaUK]

There is a lot more that can be found on an app. Menus, up to date account information. Maps. You can even sometimes bookmark activities and get reminders - always useful when you are in a quiet corner and get lost in a book. 
I can well understand that some people are happy to go with the flow with the traditional methods. You can still do that if there is an app. Choice is king. 

[bluemarble]

45 minutes ago, WantedOnVoyage said:

Maybe Cunard would be wiser to offer an "device detox" cruise experience.... sounds like its needed for some. ...

 

This is an excellent segue to a recent article in USA Today concerning "5 things to know about transatlantic crossings on the Queen Mary 2". Topping that list:

 

"1. A digital detox is harder than you think"

 

My take on the writer's point here were the issues she faced keeping up her cell phone and laptop dependent life style while on board a QM2 transatlantic crossing. She found herself forced into doing a certain amount of "digital detox", apparently more than she was expecting to have to do.

[3rdGenCunarder]

8 minutes ago, bluemarble said:

 

This is an excellent segue to a recent article in USA Today concerning "5 things to know about transatlantic crossings on the Queen Mary 2". Topping that list:

 

"1. A digital detox is harder than you think"

 

My take on the writer's point here were the issues she faced keeping up her cell phone and laptop dependent life style while on board a QM2 transatlantic crossing. She found herself forced into doing a certain amount of "digital detox", apparently more than she was expecting to have to do.

 

Before word got around that ships have internet, friends loved to do TAs because their boss and clients assumed they would be out of touch for a week. Bliss!