Costa Cruises
Global digital growth
How I doubled online cruise bookings around the world
My starting line
Costa is a European cruise ship company with a website operating in 80+ countries in 12 different languages. I joined them for 9 months in Europe to help improve their number of online booking.
Costa’s main question was:
“How do we increase online bookings when our customers are so used to booking in person at travel agencies?”
— Costa
My goal
Completely Redesign the Costa Cruises website for desktop and mobile in order to increase online bookings in a traditionally offline market.
My team
A multinational team of 10 colleagues spanning 4 countries, working together in an Agile environment.
1 Lead designer (me)
1 Visual designer
1 Project manager
1 Product owner
2 Front-end devs
3 Full stack devs
1 Data analyst
My role
Lead designer
Responsible for research, synthesis, IA, IxD, user testing, and art production
For 9 months I worked in 7 different countries doing user research and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver an engaging and simplified booking experience.
My process
Methodology
Developers and I worked hand-in-hand in agile sprints to implement the designs
Every 2 weeks we reviewed the booking funnel data to target a new problem, we ideated on solutions, then launched A/B tests to iteratively improve the experience.
Iterative improvements
The evolution of the information hierarchy and visual style of the cruise search result card is one example of how I iteratively improved the experience.
Research
30+ Cruisers and booking agents
Using a combination of research methods (guerrilla, interviews, contextual observation) I rallied the team to speak to real Costa customers from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the UK.
My solution
I reduced the booking flow from 11 steps to just 5.
I streamlined the booking experience by creating intelligent interfaces which remembers user search criteria, predicts user preferences, and recommends cruise options.
With choices like cabin location pre-selected, the user could choose the explore more locations if desired or simply skip uninteresting steps in order to get to what they most valued in a cruise.
I improved the cabin choice experience.
By introducing qualitative user research to the existing data analytics, I was able to demonstrate the importance of rich content for cabin options.
While the team knew which button placements drove more clicks, they didn’t understand why. Through research, I discovered users sought specific cabin details—like a central location to prevent seasickness or a quiet spot away from engine noise.
By integrating 360° videos, interactive ship maps, and detailed cabin amenities, I delivered the right information at the right time, making cabin selection intuitive and tailored to user needs.
Design system
I defined the interactions for buttons, drop-downs, checkboxes, tables, navigation menus, links, breadcrumbs, photo carousels, comments and more, combining them into a pattern library. This allowed the team to be much more agile and implement new designs more rapidly for our daily release cycles.
Online bookings increased by 100%
From 56 per 100k sessions to 108 per 100k sessions