Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Reduces Issue Resolution Time From Hours to Minutes with data.world’s Data Catalog
Data issue resolution in less than 10 minutes, saving hours of operational downtime.
Improved data pipeline quality monitoring, ensuring real-time visibility into guest reservation data and operational metrics.
Improved guest satisfaction, driven by personalized experiences informed by data insights.
Data Issues Resolved in Minutes
One morning, a brand president of NCLH started his day as usual at 5 a.m, reviewing a Tableau dashboard with key metrics such as ship occupancy and onboard spending. However, the dashboard was broken, and the data steward who built it was unreachable.
No one on the data team knew the cause of the issue. Cris Hadjez’s team turned to data.world to trace the problem, investigating how the data was pulled into Snowflake and published. Within less than 10 minutes, they identified the fix. Without data.world, Hadjez estimated it would have taken several hours to resolve the issue, leading to critical downtime.
The Business Challenge
After the COVID-19 pandemic brought the cruise industry to a standstill, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings (NCLH) faced the critical challenge of rebuilding guest trust as they resumed operations in 2021. With many guests hesitant to return to cruising, NCLH knew that guest safety and satisfaction had to be flawless to ensure a positive experience. Any disruption in the guest journey—from booking to disembarking—could jeopardize the company’s recovery and long-term loyalty.
However, legacy systems from different decades created a complex web of data that made it difficult to leverage insights for customizing the guest journey. With over 90% of its 40,000 employees working onboard ships where connectivity is often limited, NCLH needed a solution to centralize its guest data and streamline operations across its 28 ship fleet.
Amid these complications, Cris Hadjez, NCLH’s senior director of data governance, pushed ahead in expanding the organization’s data governance initiative to implement and catalog a new customer data platform and better serve their guests.
“You’re looking for the fastest thing to get up and running,” Hadjez explained. “You have to make the tool as intuitive as possible because if you require extensive training, people that have to only periodically go into the tool, they’re just going to abandon it.
“With data.world, someone at NCL said at one point, ‘It’s just simple and it’s powerful. It gives me everything.’”
Solution
NCLH selected data.world’s Data Catalog Platform to facilitate a comprehensive overhaul of its data infrastructure. The data.world platform allowed NCLH to:
Centralize and operationalize guest data across its fleet, ensuring real-time access and integration with their customer data platform.
Improve data lineage and observability, providing transparency into how data flows and is consumed.
Integrate with Snowflake and Monte Carlo for enhanced data monitoring and pipeline health.
The Monte Carlo monitor allows us to see and say, ‘Hey wait a second, we’re seeing a huge influx,’ ” Hadjez said. “We would have never known that before Monte Carlo and being able to see what was going on, right in data.world, we were able to dig into the issue.
The solution allowed the NCLH team to catalog disparate data sources and create a seamless guest experience, from personalized booking recommendations to onboard activity suggestions.
Results
Faster Data Issue Resolution: Using data.world’s data lineage capabilities, NCLH was able to trace and resolve data pipeline issues in under 10 minutes, significantly reducing operational disruptions.
Efficiency Boost: With the ability to quickly access and integrate data, NCLH’s data team increased their operational efficiency, allowing them to spend more time driving business value.
Personalized Guest Experiences: With the ability to centralize and analyze data, NCLH tailored vacation experiences to individual guests, from pre-boarding messages to activity suggestions based on past preferences.
Enhanced Data Observability: Through the integration with Monte Carlo, NCLH actively monitored data quality and pipeline health, particularly around guest reservations, ensuring data was accurate and up-to-date.
“Relationships with other vendors are nowhere near the relationship that we have with Customer Success at data.world. The ability to have a vested interest in a customer’s success — I think it's not just instrumental, it’s game-changing. Honestly, people don’t do that anymore, and I think that really prevents other platforms from being successful.”
Cris Hadjez
Conclusion
As NCLH continues to scale its operations, data.world remains a crucial partner in their efforts to use data to enhance guest satisfaction and operational efficiency.
They see data governance as a key driver of efficiency and innovation, enabling faster decision-making and better business outcomes.
“Data governance is not seen as slowing things down, but rather enabling things to happen,” he said. “Ultimately I would love to have the data.world platform be a one-stop shop for metadata knowledge initiatives for all our architects and for the business”
