by Sarah Kuta
Last updated: 10:20 AM ET, Thu April 23, 2026
Virgin Voyages is debuting a new artificial intelligence crew assistant named Rovey.
Developed in collaboration with Google Cloud, the new tool is part of Project Ruby, Virgin Voyages’ artificial intelligence initiative.
Built with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Gemini models and BigQuery, Rovey can make recommendations, deliver personalized answers and help travelers find the right voyages, the right cabin and the right shore excursions. Rovey then guides users through the booking process.
Rovey was developed with Google Cloud providing the underlying artificial intelligence infrastructure and model capabilities, while Virgin Voyages provided the structured data, behavioral insight and domain expertise. Rovey was built to operate as a decision-support system, capable of guiding travelers through a high-consideration purchase with context-aware recommendations, rather than a simple Q&A tool.
Virgin Voyages is planning seven future expressions of the project, each targeting a distinct friction point across the traveler experience.
“The partnership with Google Cloud gave us both the infrastructure to answer Sailor questions at scale and the intelligence to make every answer feel like it is tailored for that specific traveler,” says Andy Schwalb, chief technology officer at Virgin Voyages. “What we built reflects a decade of thinking about how technology should serve the guest experience rather than be layered on top of it.”
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