{"id":992,"date":"2022-06-13T22:21:05","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T22:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/?p=992"},"modified":"2022-07-09T07:09:59","modified_gmt":"2022-07-09T07:09:59","slug":"ai-on-cruise-ships-the-fascinating-ways-royal-caribbean-uses-facial-recognition-and-machine-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/ai-on-cruise-ships-the-fascinating-ways-royal-caribbean-uses-facial-recognition-and-machine-vision\/","title":{"rendered":"AI On Cruise Ships: The Fascinating Ways Royal Caribbean Uses Facial Recognition And Machine Vision"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][vc_column_text uncode_shortcode_id=”765754″]Editor\u2019s note:<\/strong> This is a re-post of an article from Forbes<\/a>.[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text uncode_shortcode_id=”173558″]In the travel industry,\u00a0the primary use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies revolve around improving customer experiences.[\/vc_column_text][vc_single_image dynamic=”yes” media_width_percent=”100″ uncode_shortcode_id=”915859″][vc_column_text uncode_shortcode_id=”226456″]Chatbots, in particular, have proven popular across this industry, with\u00a0natural language processing (NLP)<\/span><\/a>\u00a0applied to the challenges of dealing with customer inquiries and providing personalized travel experiences.<\/p>\n

Alongside this, recommendation engines power the most popular online travel portals such as Expedia and Trivago, combining customer data with information on millions of hotel vacancies\u00a0and airline flights worldwide.<\/p>\n

However,\u00a0when it comes to\u00a0operators, compared to other industries such as finance or healthcare, the travel industry as a whole is at an early stage when it comes to organization-wide deployment of smart, self-learning machine technology.<\/p>\n

One\u00a0industry leader\u00a0that\u00a0is bucking this trend, though, is cruise operator Royal Caribbean\u00a0Cruises.\u00a0In recent years, the world’s second-largest cruise operator has put AI to use to solve several\u00a0problems.<\/p>\n

As far as customer experience is concerned, the overriding goal has been to remove the \u201cfriction\u201d often experienced. Until recently, this was seen as an inevitable consequence of having to check in a large number of passengers at a single departure time, rather than deal with a continuous flow of guests arriving and departing, as at a hotel or resort.<\/p>\n

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The company\u2019s SVP of digital, Jay Schneider, tells me \u201cOur goal was to allow our customers to get \u2018from car to bar\u2019 in less than 10 minutes.<\/p>\n

“Traditionally it would take 60 to 90 minutes to go through the process of boarding a ship, and as a result, people didn’t feel like they were on vacation until day two \u2013 we wanted to give them their first day back.”<\/p>\n

A vital tool in achieving this aim was the deployment of facial recognition technology.\u00a0It\u00a0uses\u00a0computer-vision equipped cameras\u00a0that\u00a0can recognize travelers as they board, cutting down the need for verifying identity documents and travel passes manually.<\/p>\n

This could have been done by providing customers with wearables such as a wrist band; however, the decision was taken to eliminate the need for external devices by using biometric identifiers \u2013 faces.<\/p>\n

“We wanted to get people on their vacations as quickly as possible, and we didn’t want to have to ship every passenger a wearable \u2013 we want you to use the wearable you already have, which is your face.”<\/p>\n

Computer vision-equipped cameras are built into the terminals that customers interact with as they board, and sophisticated algorithms match the visual data they capture with photographic identification which is submitted before their departure date.<\/p>\n

AI doesn’t stop improving customer experience once guests are on board. Several other initiatives are designed to make passengers more comfortable or help them make the most of their time. These range from personalized recommendations for how they should spend their time on board, to monitoring and managing footfall as people move around the boat and queue to make use of services.<\/p>\n

These monitoring systems are also powered by computer vision, but rather than recognizing individual faces, they monitor the build-up of bodies as passengers move about, allowing congestion to be detected and dealt with where necessary.<\/p>\n

The technology for this application was built in partnership with Microsoft, and involved retro-fitting existing CCTV cameras with smart technology. This avoided the need for ships to be taken out of action while the entire camera network was upgraded with\u00a0computer vision cameras.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have massive ships \u2013 we didn\u2019t want to take them out of service, gut them and put sensors in, so we worked with Microsoft to understand how we could leverage our existing and somewhat antiquated CCTV cameras.<\/p>\n

“Microsoft was a great partner \u2026 we threw our data scientists at the problem, and we’ve been able to take old cameras, as well as fisheye cameras, and detect humans through the use of AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a ton of use cases \u2013 it gives us information on things like table turnover times in restaurants, and we\u2019re going to start using it from this summer to alert crew members when lines are backing up.\u201d<\/p>\n

This will mean crew can be redeployed in real time to wherever their services are in demand.<\/p>\n

Another initiative is aimed at cutting down on food\u00a0that\u00a0goes to waste on board cruise liners.\u00a0With 65,000 plates of food served daily aboard the vessel Symphony of the Seas, AI helps\u00a0make decisions\u00a0about how much food should be stocked to ensure guests don\u2019t go hungry while keeping wastage to a minimum.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe like to think we\u2019re probably the most sustainability-friendly cruise line \u2013 and one of the things we\u2019ve focused on when deploying AI is working towards our goals of improving sustainability. Outside of the cost savings, and improved freshness of the food we serve, it has sustainability benefits \u2026\u00a0we\u2019ve seen a reduction in food waste as a result of this pilot,\u201d says Schneider.<\/p>\n

The most recent application \u2013 which began trials just weeks ago \u2013 is Royal Caribbean\u2019s chatbot, styled as a virtual concierge, which allows passengers to ask questions about their voyage, destinations, or how they should spend their time on board.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole idea, again, is to pull people out of lines \u2013 we don\u2019t want passengers waiting in line at guest services to get questions answered, we want them to be able to get the information they need right away,\u201d Schneider tells me.<\/p>\n

The chatbot employs NLP and\u00a0machine learning<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to understand what the most commonly asked questions are, and become more efficient at providing personalized answers. It uses a \u201chuman-in-the-loop\u201d model, meaning that if it can\u2019t work out what a customer wants, a human customer\u00a0service agent is paged into the conversation. The NLP algorithms are then capable of learning how they could have tackled the question, by monitoring the human agent\u2019s response.<\/p>\n

With this, as with its other AI initiatives, Royal Caribbean follows a model of carefully monitored, small-scale trial deployments, before individual initiatives are put into organization-wide use.<\/p>\n

Schneider tells me \u201cWe believe we get the best results with this method \u2026 test, adjust, scale \u2026 rather than \u2018ready, fire, aim\u2019 \u2013 which the rest of our industry seems to do! So, once we\u2019ve carefully tested it and we\u2019re sure it\u2019s ready to go, we will scale it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to gathering data, cruise operators like Royal Caribbean are in a unique position, as they effectively function as hotels, food and beverage providers, supply chain and logistics operations, shipping operators and entertainment and gaming companies, all rolled into one.<\/p>\n

This means customer journeys can be tracked and data gathered across all of these functions, enabling a holistic approach to data-driven customer service.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you can imagine,\u201d Schneider says, \u201cthere are any number of opportunities \u2026 we\u2019ve focused on yield management in cabin occupancy \u2026 the list goes on.<\/p>\n

“We’re focused on testing, adjusting and scaling examples of where we can use AI to change the customer and the crew experience. Not everything has been successful, but the vast majority have shown early signs of success, and we’ve been extremely thrilled with the results so far.”[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][vc_column_text uncode_shortcode_id=”765754″]Editor\u2019s note: This is a re-post of an article from Forbes.[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text uncode_shortcode_id=”173558″]In the travel industry,\u00a0the primary use cases […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,11],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","category-services","tag-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1586,"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions\/1586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digicrest.com\/CLIENTS\/MOBIZ\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}