Ship crew communication & productivity app

Royal Caribbean hired us to build a mobile productivity & communication app for their 70.000 crew members located on 40 different ships across all time zones.

mobile app for crew members

Short summary

Industry

Hospitality

Location

Florida, US

Timeline

2 years

Services

Mobile development

Quality assurance

Team size

Project manager

7 software engineers
QA engineer

Technology

Mobile – React Native

Frontend – React

Backend – Java Spring Boot

Royal Caribbean Cruises is known for driving innovation in sea travel and has continuously redefined cruise vacationing since its launch in 1969.

The challenge

Taking a cruise is something truly relaxing but behind the curtains, there are thousands of people from different departments, working 24/7 to make sure that every part of the journey is well organized. In order to achieve such perfection in hospitality, you need to embrace new technologies and make sure that everyone is informed on time and well connected. 

Creating a mobile application that will work in the middle of the ocean confronted us with extraordinary challenges. Sending or receiving messages without an internet connection (no push notifications) was the key issue we had to overcome.


The solution

Mastering these limited network conditions required specific and deep know-how so our years of experience in creating real-time communication apps were crucial in building a high-quality solution.

The idea behind the CrewApp was to make the life and work of the crew onboard easier by providing them with a unified access point for communication and collaboration, thereby being a valuable addition for maintaining strong working relationships on all levels.

crew app
royal caribbean crew app
real example of crew app

Our impact

Complete offline capabilities

We made the app completely independent from the Internet. It can draw content from a local connection or from the user’s phone cache. It works seamlessly in either case.

Crew chat

This is the core of the app. We’ve made sure all crew members can reach each other at all times. Even when completely disconnected from the Internet.

Additional features

Detailed ship schedule, event calendar, personal profile of every crew member, and work schedule are features that made work easy for crew members.

CI/CD pipelines

We’ve set up Royal Caribbean’s internal CI/CD pipelines for mobile from scratch.

DECODE’s in-depth knowledge of creating real-time communication apps was exactly what we needed for such a demanding mobile app solution. Because of their high quality and speed, I consider them as a five-star agency.
Jack Templin
CEO at Thoughtcap

Outcome

Whether it’s 1-on-1 or group chat, a news and events portal, crew directory, ship navigation map, guest activity calendar, family chat, ship-to-shore or ship-to-ship communication, DECODE provided it all in one exceptional app. 

We’ve transformed the client’s communication from crew members sticking post-it notes to each other’s door to quick and easy messaging. How? With an offline-ready mobile app.

70.000

Crew members

40

Different ships

DECODE is a dedicated team

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