AI on Cruise Ships: The fascinating ways Royal Caribbean uses facial recognition and machine vision Where entry requires verifying the identity of an individual, the inevitable result is queuing and chokepoints. AI and facial recognition technologies, writes internationally bestselling author and futurist Bernard Marr, can keep things flowing. In the travel industry, the primary use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies revolve around improving customer experiences.
Chatbots, in particular, have proven popular across this industry, with natural language processing (NLP) applied to the challenges of dealing with customer inquiries and providing personalised travel experiences. Alongside this, recommendation engines power the most popular online travel portals such as Expedia and Trivago, combining customer data with information on millions of hotel vacancies and airline flights worldwide. However, when it comes to operators, compared to other industries such as
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finance or healthcare, the travel industry as a whole is at an early stage when it comes to organisation-wide deployment of smart, self-learning machine technology. One industry leader that is bucking this trend, though, is cruise operator Royal Caribbean Cruises. In recent years, the world’s second-largest cruise operator has put AI to use to solve several problems. As far as customer experience is concerned, the overriding goal has been to remove the “friction” often experienced. Until recently, this was seen as an inevitable consequence of having to check in a large number of passengers at a single departure time, rather than deal with a continuous flow of guests arriving and departing, as at a hotel or resort. The company’s SVP of digital, Jay Schneider, tells me “Our goal was to
allow our customers to get ‘from car to bar’ in less than 10 minutes. “Traditionally it would take 60 to 90 minutes to go through the process of boarding a ship, and as a result, people didn’t feel like they were on vacation until day two – we wanted to give them their first day back.” A vital tool in achieving this aim was the deployment of facial recognition technology. It uses computer-vision equipped cameras that can recognise travellers as they board, cutting down the need for verifying identity documents and travel passes manually. This could have been done by providing customers with wearables such as a wrist band; however, the decision was taken to eliminate the need for external devices by using biometric identifiers – faces. “We wanted to get people on their vacations as quickly as possible, and we didn’t want to have to ship every passenger a wearable – we want you to use the wearable you already have, which is your face.” Computer vision-equipped cameras are built into the terminals that customers interact with as they board, and sophisticated algorithms match the visual data they capture with photographic identification which is submitted before their departure date. AI doesn’t stop improving customer experience once guests are on board. Several other initiatives are designed to make passengers more comfortable or help them make the most of their time. These range from personalised
August / September 2019
