Cruising into the future with the Ocean Medallion

The future of travel isn’t being developed in Silicon Valley. It’s coming to life in a hidden warehouse in Miami, where a team of designers, developers and software engineers — a lineup you would normally associate with a startup — is working with the world’s largest leisure travel company to radically enhance the guest experience and transform the vacation industry.

Designing the future of leisure travel isn’t easy. And managing a startup within a company with over 90,000 employees is even harder. Which is why Carnival Corporation enlisted the help of Lippincott to help bring its vision of the future to market.

The concept? A personal, digital concierge brought to life through technology that operates behind the scenes in ways that make the vacation experience unique and extraordinary. For the guest, the idea is housed in a small Ocean Medallion that can be worn as a wristband or pendant, or just placed in a pocket. This Medallion provides highly personalized experiences for guests, such as making a dinner reservation while poolside at a restaurant that already knows their favorite cuisines, receiving invitations to excursions tailored to their exact personal preferences, receiving notifications when their next activity is about to begin with personalized directions to get there.

Lippincott worked as an innovation team partner, working collaboratively across Carnival and agency teams to shape and message a unified guest experience. We positioned O•C•E•A•N — or One Cruise Experience Access Network — as a lifestyle brand that inspires guests to engage in amazing vacation experiences. To tell this story, we designed, wrote and curated a range of experiences, starting with the website and other guest-facing touchpoints across the journey, and expanding them to include applications for employees, travel agents, the press and other important audiences.

Because we believe that technology needs emotional intelligence to truly thrive, we pushed developer teams to put a guest lens on the innovation and experience of the new brand, ensuring that the guest experience being created was not just technology-led, but also fundamentally humans first.