Tom Stieghorst
At first glance, the headline from a recent Princess Cruises announcement is alarming: “Princess Plays Travel Matchmaker with New ‘Places to Sea’ Mobile Experience.”
Wait. Travel matchmaker? Isn’t that what a travel agent is supposed to do?
The announcement details a new app from Princess that purports to let travelers match their cruising style to a destination or cruise.
The app has a “swipe to like” format that shows various images and gradually uses a customer’s choices to peg them as an “adventurer,” “rejuvenator,” “culturist,” “naturalist” or a “foodie.”
Developed by the cruise line’s advertising agency, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, “Places to Sea” was designed for all Android and iOS smartphone mobile devices. Princess says the free app is the first of its kind in the cruise industry.
If travel agents play the role of assessing clients and matching them to the perfect line, ship or cruise, it’s easy to see how they could be upset by a supplier offering software that does the same.
But I think the point of the app is more about consumer engagement than function. Much like the Cruise-a-Nality quiz rolled out by Carnival Corp. in 2014 ahead of its Super Bowl advertising, the “Places to Sea” app is a fun entry point into deciding to cruise.
“The swipe technology is a trend that plays well in the travel space,” said Gordon Ho, marketing vice president for Princess. “It’s easy to use and turns the travel planning process into a game that introduces unexpected places and experiences that may not have been top of mind for the consumer.”
More than 200,000 people visited the Cruise-a-Nality site in a two-month period.
But the trend toward using sophisticated software and intelligent digital agents bears watching. More than one labor economist has warned that the wave of robotics that disrupted the factory floor could be coming to the white-collar sector, claiming jobs in certain fields.
Just as the technology behind Uber threatens taxi drivers around the world, Google’s driverless cars might one day doom Uber.
W. Brian Arthur, an intelligent systems expert at the Santa Fe Institute and a former economics professor at Stanford University, calls it the “autonomous economy.”
Let’s hope that a cruise is not one of those things that most people can buy on automatic pilot.