PRINCESS CRUISES
Cruise Booking Engine
Simplifying the user flow and improving the mobile experience
Overview: Booking a cruise online is inherently complex with more variables, more decisions, and more emotional stakes than a typical e-commerce purchase. Our booking engine worked well enough for experienced cruisers who knew what they wanted, but it was losing everyone else. There were barriers for first-time cruisers, mobile users, and guests who were less comfortable navigating dense digital interfaces. I led the UX redesign to make the flow accessible to a broader range of guests without sacrificing the depth that seasoned cruisers relied on.
The redesign contributed to a 124% increase in booking conversion between 2019 and 2023. This timeframe reflects the last full year before the pandemic and the first year of full-fleet return to service.
The Situation
The existing booking flow had been built to handle complexity, and it showed. Each step surfaced as much information as possible, which made sense in theory but created real problems in practice. For guests unfamiliar with cruising or booking travel online, the density was overwhelming. Many abandoned the flow entirely and called the reservations team or worked through a travel agent instead.
The opportunity wasn't to simplify the product, as cruise booking genuinely involves many decisions. It was to simplify the experience of making those decisions and widen the range of guests who could complete a booking on their own.
TEAM: Product Owner · Manager of Web UX & Design · UX Researcher · Web UX/UI Designer (me) · Business Analyst · Marketing Specialist
My Responsibilities: Product design, information architecture, interaction design, prototyping, and competitive analysis
Research & Discovery
I conducted a competitive analysis spanning other cruise brands, cruise-focused booking platforms, and general travel booking sites. I looked for patterns in how the industry and adjacent categories handled multi-step, high-consideration purchases. Our UX researcher surveyed guests who had recently completed bookings, surfacing specific friction points from people who had actually pushed through the flow. Analytics added the quantitative layer: time-on-screen data and drop-off points that confirmed where guests were getting stuck or giving up. The picture that emerged was consistent across all three sources:
The "Number of Guests" step looked broken. There was no clear affordance for how to proceed. New users frequently stalled here, unsure whether they'd missed something.
Every step felt like too much at once. For guests unfamiliar with cruising, each screen presented a wave of information. Categories, cabin types, fare structures, and add-ons all before they'd had a chance to orient themselves. A meaningful number exited and called for help rather than continuing.
Stateroom selection was technically and experientially fragile. The entire selection experience lived on a single screen driven by drawer-open/close animations. Auto-scrolling was inconsistent, often failing to land users where they intended. The interaction model introduced unnecessary complexity and created real frustration.
The stateroom modal was overloaded. After selecting a cabin, guests were presented with a dense modal combining room details, a fare table, and options that weren't directly relevant to their choice. The cognitive load at the moment of decision was highest precisely when it should have been lowest.
The guest information forms were technically broken in places. All guest forms were consolidated on a single screen with the same animation-driven navigation. In some cases, technical issues made it impossible to advance at all, a hard stop in a booking flow.
Design
The core decision was structural: break the booking flow into a sequence of discrete, focused steps. Each screen would ask only what was necessary to move forward. This increased the total number of screens, but each one became faster to understand and easier to complete. A trade-off that the research clearly supported and lead to a leaner mobile presentation.
Progressive disclosure replaced front-loaded complexity. Rather than presenting every relevant detail at each stage, information was sequenced to match the order in which guests actually needed it. Content that didn't serve the immediate decision was moved to its own screen or deferred entirely.
Stateroom selection was rebuilt from the ground up. The single-screen drawer model was replaced with a cleaner, step-by-step structure that eliminated the animation dependencies and scroll inconsistencies. The dense post-selection modal was broken apart: room details, fare options, and secondary choices were given appropriate space and sequence.
Guest forms were separated into individual screens. This resolved the technical issues caused by consolidating all forms into a single view, and it had an immediate experience benefit. One guest at a time meant less visual noise, clearer progress, and no more dead ends.
Mobile received dedicated design attention. Smaller screens didn't just get a scaled-down version of the desktop flow — they got solutions designed specifically for the constraints of touch interaction. One that proved particularly effective: a default pre-selected stateroom in a dropdown on mobile. This addressed the challenge of small touch targets while also serving guests who didn't have a strong cabin location preference but still wanted a sense of agency in their choice.
Results
Booking conversion increased 124% from 2019 to 2023. A comparison that accounts for the significant operational gap while still capturing meaningful signal about the redesign's impact.
Guest feedback on the redesigned flow was positive across both desktop and mobile. The mobile experience was notable: in at least one measured dimension, it outperformed desktop, an outcome that would have been difficult to imagine given where the mobile experience started.
The redesign was most meaningfully felt by the guests it was built for, first-time cruisers and those less comfortable with online booking. For these users, the difference between the old flow and the new one wasn't incremental, it was the difference between completing a booking independently and abandoning it.
Learnings & What's Next
Two areas of friction survived the redesign and pointed toward the next iteration.
Photography quality and variety. Stateroom imagery varied significantly across cabin types, and weaker photography undermined confidence at a key decision point. Better, more consistent visuals would strengthen the experience at the moments that matter most.
Pricing structure clarity. The fare model — multiple cabin categories, fare tiers, and bundled options — created confusion that design alone couldn't fully resolve. Clearer pricing presentation, ideally paired with simplified fare logic, remains an opportunity.
A subsequent design iteration addressed both issues directly, incorporating updated photography treatment and revised pricing display using the refreshed brand color system. Those designs are included below.
