Aqua Expeditions
Aqua Expedition's Bold Move to Digitalise and Scale Business at Asia's Door Step
Aqua Expeditions, a renowned global leader in luxury small-ship cruises, offers world-class, award-winning vessels that traverse the world's most wildlife- and culture-rich destinations. With a strategic focus on Asian markets, Aqua moved its global headquarters from Peru to Singapore in 2014. A year later, they decided to automate their processes and enhance personalisation for their high-net-worth clientele by partnering with Red Airship as their key technology consultant and solution provider.
Since then, Aqua Expeditions has witnessed a staggering fourfold growth in direct revenue between 2018 and 2022—an accomplishment rarely seen within the industry.
Summary
Aqua Expeditions partnered with Red Airship to undergo a comprehensive digital transformation, addressing challenges such as a lack of centralised information, an inefficient website, and an unreliable booking platform.
Red Airship implemented a customer-centric CRM system, automating over 100 internal work processes and enhancing customer experience and internal productivity.
The collaboration resulted in a fourfold increase in direct revenue between 2018 and 2022, with a custom booking system and other upgraded touchpoints contributing to an outstanding ROI of over 10,000% in four years.
Red Airship has delivered exceptional value to Aqua Expeditions through their consultancy and design support services to the company. Over the past 5 years, they have taken care in helping us design, plan and implement new digital capabilities that have transformed the way we work internally and how our clients interact with us. We look forward to more collaborations in the future and highly recommend them as a consultant.
Challenges Faced
To adapt to changing customer expectations due to increased digital technology adoption, Aqua sought to automate processes and data collection to improve the end-to-end customer experience and streamline backend operations. After extensive consultation with internal stakeholders, Red Airship identified the following challenges:
Lack of centralized information, customer engagement tools, and platform
Absence of workflow automation
Inefficient, slow, and poorly designed website inherited from previous vendors
Unreliable off-the-shelf booking platform with poor user experience
Slow and inadequate systems support
Data duplication and inconsistency, hindering the extraction of accurate insights
Solution by Red Airship
Red Airship devised guiding principles and a digital blueprint addressing the root causes of the challenges faced. The solutions aimed to improve customer experience, enhance administrative processes, reduce stakeholder burdens, provide on-demand and reliable data analytics, and be scalable and adaptable to future change.
Red Airship prioritized the following areas:
CRM implementation and training
Integration of existing Cruise Reservation System (CRS) and finance systems
Enhanced booking platforms for customers and agents
Interim design improvements for the website
Automated, self-service, online check-in system
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Red Airship recommended Zoho's CRM as the most cost-effective solution for Aqua Expeditions. The team integrated various systems to create a singular, customer-centric view in the new CRM. Over 100 internal work processes were automated, improving both customer experience and internal productivity.
Upgraded Touchpoints
By moving away from off-the-shelf solutions and developing a customized booking system, Red Airship eliminated previous limitations to deliver a better user experience (UX). The result was a fourfold leap in conversions and revenue, achieving an outstanding ROI of over 10,000% in four years.
Unified Design Language
Red Airship established a central design system to ensure Aqua's brand consistency across all touchpoints, laying the groundwork for future growth.
The Future
Continuing their close collaboration, Red Airship and Aqua Expeditions are now exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and custom machine learning (ML) models to tackle data deduplication challenges. They are committed to building a strategic digital roadmap that remains focused on achieving positive business outcomes.
Red Airship crews are excellent at what they do and I enjoy the "thinking" sessions facilitated by them to gain clarity and alignment on the projects we worked with them. What sets them apart from other vendors I worked with is they take ownership of the projects and go the extra mile to think on behalf of us (as customers) and share their findings with us candidly. While I am a client, I also learn from them when working with them. The team at Red Airship has been a joy to work with, I would highly recommend any clients with a digital initiative to work with them.
