WHY IT RATES: More than 99 percent of Princess Cruises guests are choosing to use the OceanMedallion—Patrick Clarke, TravelPulse Senior Writer.
Accenture has been named Premier Innovation Partner for Carnival Corporation’s Global Experience and Innovation Team to roll out the MedallionClass Experience currently available exclusively onboard Princess Cruises, delivering personalized service at scale.
The Princess MedallionClass Experience revolves around the OceanMedallion wearable device and a secure Experience Internet of Things (xIoT) network. The OceanMedallion communicates with the xIoT network, offering guests a seamless experience when accessing areas and services, ordering food and drink, and finding friends and family anywhere on the ship.
One of the key benefits for guests starts before they even board the ship. Using the OceanReady digital experience, MedallionClass guests can complete 95 percent of boarding steps on mobile devices before arrival. This reduces wait time by more than 90 percent, shortening to about 30-60 seconds a process that used to take 15-20 minutes.
Once guests are onboard, the xIoT network provides real-time data about guests that enables the crew to serve guests with higher levels of personalization as they move around the ship. Enabling frictionless payment, keyless stateroom access, cashless casino and streamlined embarkation, the OceanMedallion creates hassle-free cruising so guests can maximize every moment of their precious vacation time.
To date, more than 99 percent of guests are opting to use the OceanMedallion for a fully connected experience.
“Accenture helped us bring our original xIoT idea to life, participating from ideation through the design, development and implementation phases,” said John Padgett, Carnival Corporation’s chief experience and innovation officer. “We value Accenture as a Premier Innovation Partner and look forward to continued collaboration to continuously enhance the platform based on both guest feedback and the tremendous amount of intelligence being generated.”
The xIoT solution generates millions of data points during a typical cruise, which will ultimately assist in the design of future ships as well as energy efficiency solutions. Transforming each Princess ship into a MedallionClass™ vessel takes place during a 12-day drydock in which the ship is outfitted with the infrastructure — which includes 72 miles of cable, 7,000 sensors, 650 readers and more than 4,000 interactive portals. Apart from the interactive portals, all the technology is seamless and virtually invisible.
Accenture leveraged expertise and capabilities from across its entire business to help build the future-ready system for Carnival:
—Professionals from Accenture Interactive and Fjord (its design and innovation unit) helped in the wearable Medallion industrial design that communicates between the guests and the ship’s technologies, creating the seamless customer experience.
—Accenture Applied Intelligence helped develop an AI-powered “experience intelligence” engine to provide a personalized and unique experience for every guest based on specific choices, behaviors and preferences — integrating streaming analytics and machine learning to power experience intelligence and orchestrate a variety of guest data sources.
—Accenture Technology also provided technical architecture, software development and delivery capabilities, as well as testing and validation.
“By putting guests at the center, Carnival is positioning itself as what we call a ‘living business’ — a company that unlocks sustained growth by continuously adapting to customer needs to achieve hyper-relevance,” said John Spencer, a managing director in Accenture’s Travel practice and the company’s client lead for Carnival. “They achieve this by constantly learning, adapting and evolving with business strategies that champion customer needs, wants and desires. We’re excited to be a premier innovation partner for Carnival Corporation’s Global Experience Innovation team, working together not only to help implement and maintain the guest experience platform but to continuously take the best-in-class platform to new levels.”
The OceanMedallion recently received the 2019 IoT Wearables Innovation of the Year award by IoT Breakthrough and the Ocean Guest Experience Platform received a Gold New York Design Award for Digital IoT. In addition, Carnival received three U.S. patents protecting 46 intellectual property innovations of OceanMedallion.
Accenture is bringing some of the intellectual property from the program, which Carnival owns, into Accenture Labs and its broader Innovation Architecture to drive further innovation for Carnival as well as other clients in the oil and gas, restaurant and hotel industries.
SOURCE: Carnival Corporation & plc press release.
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