customer story

Norwegian Cruise

70% Less Time Spent Diagnosing Problems and 98% Site Availability

Site availability, consistently

Reduction in time diagnosing issues

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, which owns and operates three different cruise brands – Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises, and Regent Seven Seas Cruises – uses full ecommerce capabilities on their websites, allowing between 3,000 and 4,000 daily users to browse different cruise options, customize their trips, and book their tickets directly on the site.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings partnered with Catchpoint to:

Ensure site speed and availability across all online properties.
Identify performance issues with third-party tags on their sites.
Evaluate potential performance degradation of third-party marketing tags before going live.
Easily share performance data with other departments and vendors.

Employees:

10,000+

Revenue:

$1.28 Billion

Headquarters:

Miami, FL

Industry:

eCommerce

In the last year and a half since switching to Catchpoint, our reliability has improved and remained at a high level. Prior to working with Catchpoint, we dedicated significant time to examining errors that were not related to our website. Catchpoint is now saving our team time and resources wasted on troubleshooting on false positives.

Vamshi Dudi

Web Operations Administrator

Problem

Given the nature of the Norwegian Cruise Line’s site functionality, as well as their global user base across their different brands, they required an end-user experience monitoring (EUM) tool that would allow them to optimize their customer experience at every step of the buyer’s journey. Moreover, they needed a solution that would not only alert them when any component – first- or third-party – fails to perform as needed, but would also allow them to diagnose and correct the problem as quickly as possible.

With their previous monitoring vendor, Norwegian Cruise Line suffered through poor user experience and an inability to customize their tests in order to get actionable data. Thus, when looking for a better solution, they were swayed by Catchpoint’s customizable scripting tool, which allows them to write and modify their own Selenium scripts in order to drill down to the kind of performance data that has a direct impact on their customer experience initiatives.

Solution

In order to accomplish their goal, Norwegian uses Catchpoint’s web observers for the bulk of their needs. However, if there’s an issue with a specific component, then they will use more precise Catchpoint observers such as DNS, Traceroute, or any of the 14 different monitors that Catchpoint users have access to.

Furthermore, NCLH has several marketing-related tags on their sites that cover things such as integration with partners (e.g., vacation tours that customers can book through NCL.com), third-party advertisements, tracking tags, and promotional images. Yet they also know that every tag which is added to the site is another potential performance pitfall.

They use Catchpoint to conduct tests on every tag before it goes live to get an idea of the kind of performance impact it will have. After it goes live, the NCLH operations team conducts more tests of the site and the tag and shares them with the marketing team so that they can evaluate whether or not it’s financially beneficial to keep it.

Also included in Norwegian’s evaluation was the integrity and breadth of Catchpoint’s global node coverage. After experiencing frequent problems with their previous vendor’s nodes, which delayed their operations initiatives by many hours each time, Norwegian needed assurances that the data they received from the nodes would be accurate.

Results

Like any travel/ecommerce company, Norwegian Cruise Line will lose business if their sites are slow or unresponsive. This means pages loading in two seconds or less, as well as availability as close to 100% as possible.

Thanks to Catchpoint’s customizable analytical capabilities and innovative alerting systems, Norwegian has been able to achieve a consistent availability goal of at least 98%, something they were unable to do with their previous vendor.

Coupled with a decrease in their average page load time, this means better financial performance of all of the online systems across the NCLH brands.

Perhaps more important, the drastic reduction in false alerts and error-filled data has been hugely beneficial to the NCLH operations team. That, combined with the improved ability to identify and troubleshoot problems through the Catchpoint scatterplot and waterfall charts, has freed up a huge amount of time for them to focus on other activities.

No longer having to spend hours or even days at a time just trying to sift through data and determine what is actionable and what isn’t has meant a 60-70% reduction in the amount of time that they spend on diagnosing problems.

"In the last year and a half since switching to Catchpoint, our reliability has improved and remained at a high level. Prior to working with Catchpoint, we dedicated significant time to examining errors that were not related to our website. Catchpoint is now saving our team time and resources wasted on troubleshooting on false positives," says Vamshi Dude, NCLH Web Operations Administrator.

Moving forward, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings will be expanding their web properties around the globe, which will mean the development and testing of 10 to 20 new sites in different languages. This initiative will require extensive testing of the sites and all of their different components in all of the locations where users will be accessing them, which means that Catchpoint’s analytics and global node coverage will become even more important for Norwegian.