Leader Spotlight: Making creative decisions backed by data, with Raul Parquet

Raul Parquet is Director of Ecommerce at Princess Cruises, where he’s leading a full-scale digital transformation of Princess.com. With a career spanning more than 20 years in the cruise and travel industry — including leadership roles at Celebrity Cruises and Royal Caribbean — Raul brings a rare blend of creative thinking and data discipline to digital strategy.

At Princess, Raul is driving efforts to simplify cruise booking and unlock new revenue through web merchandising, personalization, and seamless pre-cruise planning. In this interview, he shares how his team uses guest analytics to shape product and UX decisions, what a mobile-first testing culture looks like in a high-stakes, low-frequency environment, and how personalization strategies stretch across the entire customer journey — from early search to onboard experience.

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Personalizing at scale through analytics

You have an extensive background in analytics. How did you build that skill set within the cruise industry?

Before COVID, the travel domain — and especially cruise — leveraged analytics, but it wasn’t a major focus. The industry was strong, and demand was high. Between 2016 and 2019, cruise lines were building ships as fast as they could, and we still couldn’t meet demand. Digital was important, but most bookings still came through travel agents or call centers. Cruise companies saw the website as useful, but not essential. They were happy to take bookings any way they could.

When COVID hit, that changed overnight. For 15–18 months, cruise lines couldn’t operate, and the shift to digital accelerated dramatically. We had to quickly ramp up our understanding of what was happening on our websites and apps. We could still accept bookings, but only for future sailings, so the focus became lead generation, engagement, sweepstakes — anything to keep customers connected.

That period forced the industry to learn a lot more about online customer behavior. Coming out of COVID, the challenge was getting back to profitability while keeping that digital momentum. Now, most cruise and travel companies recognize that digital is the most efficient, cost-effective sales channel. Many have adopted a digital-first approach, which makes analytics essential. You need to understand what’s happening on the site, continuously optimize it, and turn those insights into better business decisions.

What do you find most rewarding about working in an industry that has such a high-consideration purchase?

We’re not selling shoes or t-shirts where a customer visits your site once, already knows what they want, and you can get them to buy with a sale or an incentive. Vacations are very personal. Families, couples, friends, grandparents — everyone takes time to organize them. That knowledge-gathering and discovery process can take many weeks or even months.

There are different types of customers. There are people who are new to cruising and have never been on a cruise before. They’re visiting the site to learn and to understand what a cruise experience is all about.

Then there are customers who are new to your brand. They have cruised with other brands but want to try yours to see what unique aspects or features it offers that are different from what they are used to.

And then there is the loyalty guest. They have traveled with your brand, they love you, and they keep coming back. You are helping them love you even more. Maybe they started by cruising the Caribbean, and now they are ready to try a cruise to Alaska or Europe. Those customers are great.

The key is that the website has to understand where each person is in their journey. The only way to do that is through analytics, gathering that information, and then building plans, initiatives, and optimizations based on those learnings.

I’ve always been creative, but once I learned to use analytics to power the creativity of the team and guide strategy, it changed everything. We don’t do anything without data. Whether it's UX testing or optimization, analytics powers all of it. The more we engage with users, the more we know. Sometimes an ecommerce plan works the way you expect, but a lot of times the data tells a different story. In those cases, it’s about iteration — or pivoting entirely.

There is a fair amount of complexity in the customer journey. As you hire for your team, what qualities or characteristics do you look for?

It helps to have experience in the space or at least in B2C, of course. But for my team specifically, I’m looking for creative people who know how to use data and numbers to fuel that creativity, like we spoke about earlier.

I want people who are proactive. I can’t have the team always reacting. In this space, we have to keep pushing forward, constantly looking for new ways to be successful. That means a lot of curiosity, a willingness to experiment, and the ability to bring ideas from outside of travel into travel. If something works well in another industry or with a different technology, how can we translate that into cruise and travel? That’s really important for us.

It doesn’t have to be the most experienced or most educated person. What matters most is someone who understands ecommerce, commercial strategy, and behavioral analytics — and who can take insights about guest behavior on the site and translate them into development plans, strategies, and ideas.

Laying the groundwork for digital transformation

When you first joined Princess Cruises, how did you approach assessing the state of the website?

Before I took the position, I evaluated where Princess was in the cruise industry, particularly how the website compared to my past experience and to other brands in the space. Once I started, it became a process of discovery, focused analytics, and prioritization to understand how the site was operating from a performance perspective.

While we were doing the analysis on the data and performance, we were also trying to understand the infrastructure of the organization and determine how we wanted to grow our small team to meet the demands of the brand.

What were the biggest challenges you faced in simplifying the digital experience to drive more self-service bookings?

The website has a lot of different facets to it. It’s informational, educational, a place for loyalty members to log in and view details — but it also has to drive business and convert. There’s a merchandising aspect. It must recognize where someone is in their travel journey, whether they’re new to cruising or already familiar with the brand, and give them the information they need to move forward.

Initially, we fixed broken pages, improved the content and merchandise promotional display, and worked in parallel to build out the infrastructure to grow the team.

The cruise industry has traditionally been slow to adapt to technology. There are three ways that customers can book and reserve cruises. Traditionally, guests have booked through travel agents or by calling the cruise line directly. More recently, cruise brands have grown their websites as a direct-to-consumer channel.

We had to shift to a more digital model with strategic alignment across departments. ecommerce couldn’t do this alone; we needed buy-in from marketing, revenue management, operations, everyone. That takes time — years of collaboration, culture change, and shared prioritization. At first, there was some skepticism. But we said, let us prove it to you. Give us a little time, and we’ll show results. Once we did, and people saw the improvements, that trust built across teams — and that’s what drove collaboration.

That mindset really helped us drive a lot of ideas and plans that we knew worked from using them in previous roles. In a new role, especially one that involves working cross-functionally, you need to come up with your strategy and ideas, but you have to prove it with data. You need data to drive change.

Optimizing experiences across touchpoints

How do you think about digital transformation through that whole customer journey?

The hardest part is, hands down, booking the cruise. It's one of the biggest travel decisions a family makes. Once the guest has booked the cruise and we know a lot about them, then we start marketing to them pretty consistently to try and get them back to the site because we want them to plan all the activities they're going to do on their cruise. And you could do that planning through the website as well.

That planning happens in what we call the pre-cruise area of the site, where guests can book excursions, spa treatments, Wi-Fi, dining reservations, transfers, airfare, and more. It’s not just about selling add-ons — it’s about giving people time to plan with their families. They’ll book spa treatments, shore excursions, Wi-Fi, all of it. Then when they board, it’s already taken care of — and they still spend more on the ship.

Then, usually about two to three weeks before the cruise, emails go out that encourage the customer to download the app. The app becomes the traveler’s planner on board — showing daily activities, reservations, their folio, and other important details they will engage with throughout the trip.

And once someone cruises, they’re likely to come back. It’s about extending the relationship beyond a single trip.

Exploring new tools to enhance the guest experience

As you think about the different tools, methodologies, or practices that are available now or might be on the horizon, what are you most excited about?

AI has grown tremendously. It can be a heaven-sent tool, or it can feel overwhelming — like a deep hole you cannot get out of because you’re burdened with so much information.

We have started introducing AI into many of the things we do. It helps with reporting, summarizing reports, and identifying insights more quickly. On the site, some of the applications we launched now have AI components. As customers take action, those components automate the collection of insights and send them back to us with recommendations for us to act on.

Before, someone had to run the reports, analyze the data, come up with recommendations, and present them to executives. Now, AI can handle much of that process. We still review what the AI gives us, but it saves a lot of time. We can adjust, enhance, or simplify its findings and then quickly share meaningful insights about customer actions on the site.

In the future, some of these applications may help customers directly by suggesting trips or experiences they might be interested in. The cruise customer is different from other online shoppers, like those who shop at Amazon or eBay. The more you invest in digital, the younger your audience becomes. Reaching a younger audience increases adoption of new applications and tools. In the cruise industry, once a consumer tries the product, the chances are very high that they will return for future experiences. As we invest more heavily in digital and in our ecommerce site, the younger your demographic becomes, and this translates to a longer customer life cycle.

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