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As digitaltravel.io grows from a fledgling start-up into a business that has been trading for five years, with more than 100 clients around the world, we thought it was high time we started sending monthly updates to all our valued partners.
Welcome to the first of them. Each month we’ll share what we’ve been building, what we’re seeing in cruise search trends, and a snapshot of the digital travel industry news worth your time from the last 30 days.
Bookable hotels join cruise on our search platform
Our web search platform now supports hotels. Powered by Traveltek’s JSON API, it gives access to more than 100,000 hotels worldwide from all the top travel suppliers, and delivers a fast, modern hotel booking experience with geographic mapping and a clean, intuitive interface tailored to your travel brand.
Customers can filter by name, area and facilities, search by island or region, browse a map view, and check out quickly with booking confirmation emails. The first sites are now live. It’s available as a standalone hotel search or as part of a cruise package with pre- and post-stay hotels and flights.
Hardened security standards across the platform
With data security more important than ever, new and existing app hosting infrastructure is now built to our hardened security standards. On the View My Booking portals, travellers can now link an existing booking to their account in a simple one-time process. Industry trade partners are managed directly in the View My Booking CMS, and CMS logins are now protected by two-factor authentication. Stored personal data is encrypted across every area of the platform.
Travel app enhancements
- Customer quotes direct from the CMS are now available in the app, helping you make the most of every sales enquiry.
- Push notifications across our app platform can now include images and analytics labels, and integrate with marketing platforms for a joined-up customer contact strategy.
- New app hosting is built to our hardened security standard, and we’ve strengthened security across our live app platform.
Cash in on your cruise specials
Cruise specials you create manually in our website CMS, with added flights, hotels and tours, can now be given a simple, fast online booking option that takes a deposit and secures the customer’s commitment online, ready for you to fulfil. It’s proving a fast, high-converting way to sell more complex cruise packages online.
Cruise booking in Australia and New Zealand
Hurtigruten is now bookable for Australian and New Zealand customers, and Carnival’s latest API changes are in place, supporting free cabin upgrades.
Wheelhouse: one view of every site we run
We host more than a hundred WordPress websites. Our internal Wheelhouse platform brings them all into a single dashboard, with daily backups, uptime alerts, page-speed tracking and security update status at a glance.
Faster and more reliable
Automated testing now runs on every new website build and every update to our website themes, and popular search results load faster on our newest sites. They’re linked to our Cruise Intelligence dashboard, which we’ll be showcasing at World Travel Market in November.
Based on aggregated, anonymised cruise-search data from across the online travel agent industry, September versus August:
The autumn pivot continued
The Norwegian fjords fell 3.6 points to 8.0% of region searches as the season closed, while the Caribbean rose to 14.1%. The Mediterranean still leads at 25.1%. Ambassador, Fred. Olsen and Silversea each gained around 1.5 points of interest.
People are booking further ahead
The typical gap between search and sailing rose to 218 days (from 194), and 41% of searches were six to twelve months out. November and December 2026 and September 2027 were the departure months gaining ground.
Regional ports are gaining
Southampton still leads at about 35% of port searches but dropped nearly four points. Liverpool was the biggest gainer, rising to nearly 6%.
Ambassador’s new trade portal
Launched on 23 September, with individual agent logins so bookings are credited to the agent who made them. The old system closed on 30 September.
Princess Cruises launches inside ChatGPT
On 28 September Princess became the first global cruise line to do so, with live pricing and availability across 17 ships. Bookings still complete in Princess’s own systems.
AI booking agents are arriving
Meta’s Muse launched on 9 September and can book flights across 500+ airlines. Skift has since warned that the costs of serving these agents land on travel companies now, with the benefits coming later.
CLIA Cruise Week
Ran from 14 to 20 September across the UK and Ireland, with offers on upgrades, onboard credit, solo supplements and drinks packages.
Platform releases
iOS 27 shipped on 14 September. WordPress 7.1.1 and 7.1.2 are both security releases. If you run WordPress yourself, please update now.
- October: CLIA Cruise Month in Australia, with nearly 40 webinars for member agents.
- 20 to 22 October: WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 (final release due 8 to 10 December). We’ll test it in our development environments before it reaches any client site.
- 3 to 5 November: WTM London at ExCeL. Let us know if you’ll be there, as we’d love to meet.
As always, if you’d like to talk about anything in this update or what it could mean for your site please get in contact.
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