Cruise Finder by iCruise.com is an award winning mobile app with quite a history all its own. Its origins begin at WMPH Vacations well before receiving accolades from the likes of the Los Angeles Times and Travel + Leisure magazine.
Now, it is a source for real-time costs and details about 38 cruise lines, 310 cruise ships and 25,000 international itineraries via search, calendars, deck plans and a high-res photo-driven interface.
We had the chance to exclusively ask Uf Tukel, co-founder and co-president of WMPH Vacations / iCruise.com, all about the app's development, its unique market position and future.
Why did WMPH Vacations originally decide to acquire iCruise.com?
When we started WMPH Vacations back in 2004, the first website we launched was CruiseCheap.com-a site dedicated to, you guessed it, cheap cruises. The site was search engine optimized for low priced cruises and as a result, the site organically attracted and continues to attract guests looking to cruise on a budget.
We were selling a lot of low-priced, low-margin cruises. While we did sell our share of Europe, Alaska and Panama Canal cruises, most of our guests booked shorter cruises and preferred inside and oceanview cabins instead of the higher yielding balcony and suites.
We were selling a lot of cabins but not making much money. On top of that, we had difficulty getting co-op and support from some cruise suppliers who didn't really want their brands associated with a "cheap" cruise brand.
In 2005, we realized the cheap cruise business model alone just wasn't sustainable and in our best long-term interest, so we started acquiring destination based domains like AlaskaCruises.com, EuropeCruises.com and HawaiiCruiseOutlet. All three of these brands represented bucket-list destinations that are longer, more complicated and expensive than Caribbean and Bahamas cruises.
And sure enough, we found guests were willing and eager to pay for balconies, suites, excursions, pre-post hotels and travel insurance. We spent over $100,000 on destination-based domain acquisitions, and the investment definitely paid off as it related to attracting first-time customers to WMPH Vacations.
Unfortunately, we had a big problem retaining customers and getting them to book future cruises with us.
When a guest bought an Alaska cruise from AlaskaCruises.com, they didn't realize we sold other destinations. And if they did, these higher yielding guests didn't necessarily want to buy their next cruise from CruiseCheap.com. So, we had an identity crisis on our hands. We needed a cruise brand that would be appealing to our past guests and referrals but also attract new customers as well.
It was literally sheer luck and divine intervention that brought WMPH and iCruise.com together.
iCruise.com was one of the early online cruise brands of the late 90s. It never fully recovered when the bubble popped and ended up in the hands of a group in South Florida. We were already doing some private label cruise fulfillment at CheapCaribbean.com and AutoEurope / DestinationOceans, and the owners of the iCruise.com domain asked us to take over the servicing of their clients and fulfill new bookings for them.
Eventually, they asked if we would be interested in buying them and we did. With iCruise.com, we now owned a cruise brand we could proudly and confidently market to the past guests of our destination brands.
We bought iCruise.com in 2007, about three months before Apple announced the iPhone.
As we hoped, the iCruise brand significantly outperforms CruiseCheap.com in virtually every metric including average sale amount, average commission, percentage of balconies and suites, insurance penetration, length of cruise etc. Additionally, our repeat customer percentage on brands like AlaskaCruises.com has gone from 4% to over 20%. Overall as a company, we are now over 30% repeat guests.
What then initially prompted the development of the Cruise Finder by iCruise.com app?
Like I said earlier, we bought iCruise.com in 2007, about three months before Apple announced the iPhone. The timing of the purchase was a total coincidence.
We had no idea how big the iPhone would be for iCruise and our business.
I didn't buy the first iPhone but I was certainly an early adopter. The first time I saw a commercial, I knew I had to have one. I'll never forget when Apple started running those "There's an app for that" commercials. There was the sleek looking iPhone in all its glory on TV with a simple voiceover, "Looking for a restaurant? There's an app for that. Looking for a new car? There's an app for that. Looking for a movie theater? There's an app for that. Looking for a hotel? Well, there's an app for that too."
I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for the guy to say, "Looking for a Cruise Vacation? There's an app for that."
It never came up.
So, the wheels started spinning and I thought about how cool it would be to have iCruise on the iPhone. So I started Googling app development companies. I spoke to a few companies, and they were all a lot more expensive than I expected. I started talking it over with my business partner, Don, and said the marketing message about iCruise on the iPhone alone would be worth it.
Honestly, we did not expect any significant business from the iPhone app. We just wanted to say we had a cruise app. We had no idea it would generate the business it did. We even trademarked "There's a Cruise for That."
The WMPH in WMPH Vacations stands for We Make People Happy, and internally we joked about becoming "We Make People Appy"!
So basically, sheer bragging rights is what prompted the development of our Cruise Finder app. Probably not the most sound business reason to take on [an] expensive development project, but luckily it paid off!
Even today, when I walk into an Apple store wearing my royal blue iCruise logo shirt, a shopper may ask me if iCruise is a new Apple product. I love it when that happens.
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What makes the app so unique in the marketplace?
I think the most unique aspects of our apps is just the sheer amount of cruise content and search options we have. And that it's really easy to use and pretty intuitive.
We have almost 40 different cruise lines and well over 300 ships. We have day-by-day itineraries on over 25,000 different cruise, cruise-tour and river departures. With photos and weather for almost every port of call. We have the most complete, dynamic and clickable deck plans, including side-view cutouts, category and cabin descriptions, cabin photos, ship facts, ship photos, cruise line photos. We have cruise news, port driving directions, destination and departure port calendars.
All cruises can be saved to favorites or shared with friends via email, Facebook or Twitter. And our clients can request a quote by email or book it online if it's bookable online. It's really cool.
We put a lot of work into it and [are] very proud of what it has to offer.
How has the mobile app evolved since 2009?
The first version of Cruise Finder app was released on the iPhone 4 with a 4" inch screen. About six months later, we launched for Android and then later on the Kindle.
The first versions had basic search, cruise line content, ship content, deck plans, port directions, cabin information, etc. You couldn't book a cruise or even get live pricing back then. No one had yet built a mobile responsive cruise booking template yet. And there were restrictions on how large the app packet could be. If it was over 20MB, you couldn't download over cellular-only on Wifi. We wanted the app to be downloadable from anywhere at any time, so we were limited [by] how much we had on the app.
As the phones themselves evolved to be faster, taller, wider with retinal displays, better resolution and more memory, we improved the presentation of our content.
Tabbed itineraries that included day-by-day itineraries with detailed itinerary maps and photos, what's included and not included on your cruise tab, other dates sections, bonus offers and overlays we didn't have in earlier versions. We added a cruise tracker feature that notified guests when prices went up or down.
We improved our deck plans and then worked with Revelex, our cruise provider, to build the first mobile ready cruise booking templates making us one of the first, if not first, to book a cruise in a mobile app. And push notifications have become an affordable way to notify users of special promotions and deals.
Much of the evolution occurred behind the scenes in the technology behind serving the content. We implemented content delivery solutions, APIs web services, etc. to make it faster and more consistent as well.
Of course, when Apple launched the iPad in 2010, that opened up another channel of opportunities and we spent the next year building and designing for that too.
Does it have features that can be used online and offline, say, while disconnected onboard or ashore?
Unfortunately, at this time you can only use the apps when you are connected to the internet.
However, if you looked at content for a particular ship or itinerary and saved it to your favorites, the apps cache should save it to view offline. If not, it won't work. As international data plans become more affordable, we would like to introduce useful content that can take advantage of the geolocation features of the phone when the user is in a particular port of call.
How does it keep track of so many different cruise lines and ships at once?
We work with all the cruise lines to curate all of our own cruise line, ship, itinerary content including photos, deck plans, deals, promotions, etc. This is all stored in our own Content Management System and on Amazon Web Services CDN. The Cruise Finder apps connect via APIs to our app-server to access a number of different web services.
The good news is that this content is the same content we use on all our websites, but the content is built and stored such that it can be presented in any format on our website, apps, or mobile websites. We don't have to maintain separate content for the apps.
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What does the future hold for both the Cruise Finder app and iCruise.com?
With regards to the Cruise Finder Apps themselves, we still have a long way to go with regards to taking advantage of user-generated content.
I really like how the ShipMates App has done a good job of building community and getting their users to post reviews and pictures of their vacations. We thought of that too but never made it a priority to get it done. We were more about lead generation and bookings, but asking our guests to provide ship and cabin photos will happen in the future.
We also expect to see the apps evolve to become a more interactive part of the post-cruise booking experience.
Communication between the guest and our customer service department or their booking agent can be a big differentiator. We should be taking advantage of push notifications that are relevant to a person's individual vacation just like the airlines and hotels do. We will also integrate messenger services so our guests can communicate with us [in] real time. I love the way the Lola Travel App communicates with their customers.
Consumer communication preferences are evolving. Not everyone wants to talk on the phone anymore. We need to give the guest choices in how they want to work with us, and the apps will be a big part of that whether it's phone, email, SMS or chat.
As for iCruise and WMPH Vacations, we are not done building apps. Last year we acquired CruiseNow.com, and we plan to build this out as an app specifically for last minute cruise deals.
We also believe we have more than enough content to build apps around specific cruise niches as well. We are also doing a lot of dynamic cruise packaging combining cruises with hotels and other land products. We will make it a priority to incorporate these into our apps too.
So much to do, so little time!
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