IU grad launches tech startup to improve cruise booking experience
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A travel tech startup in Bloomington is looking to streamline the booking process for people who want to take a cruise.
CruiseAlly recently launched its platform that is designed to provide personalized, data-driven recommendations based on a user’s vacation needs instead of just price and location.
Co-founder and CEO Justin Tait, an Indiana University graduate who himself has been on nearly two dozen cruises, said the idea was born out of frustration over the status quo when it comes to online cruise booking.
“Right now, there are generally tens to hundreds of options, sometimes even thousands, and they’re qualified generally only by date and by price. And quite frankly, there’s so much more to it than that,” Tait told Inside INdiana Business.
The idea for CruiseAlly dates back to 2017, when Tait had a bad cruise experience and wanted to find a way to make the entire process better. He said it took about six years to go from idea to product, a process that was hampered by the pandemic.
The development process was a complicated one, Tait added.
“We had to actually figure out how we would actually do this?” he said. “How do you actually provide these recommendations in a way that doesn’t introduce bias, so that the consumer is actually getting the best recommendation? How do we get the live availability, the live pricing, the live data feed into each of those cruise lines? And how do we marry all those pieces together so that people actually can get a recommendation and book within minutes, the way we intended?”
The CruiseAlly platform, Tait said, asks users a few simple questions and then uses over 10,000 data points along with live availability before offering recommendations.
But Tait says the most important part of the process is showing users why these recommendations are being made.
“We recommend not only the cruise line and the cruise ships, but we give you the important information that you need in order to feel confident in that decision: what’s included on board, what’s not included, what is there to do on board, and are those things even included with the regular fare?” he said. “What we’re really aiming to do is take a process that can take hours and knock it down to mere minutes.”
Tait moved to California and spent four years working at Meta. He started working on CruiseAlly while still on the West Coast but decided to move back to Bloomington to focus on the platform.
He said while most of the company’s team works remotely on the east and west coasts, working in Bloomington has proved to be particularly useful, especially when it comes to mentorship.
“This is my first time doing something really big like this,” he said. “So The Mill was really helpful. We went through an initial accelerator with them. Then through that whole process, I’ve met a number of really wonderful people in the Bloomington area and the wider Indiana region who have just provided wonderful mentorship and guidance.”
Tait said the company has done a “soft launch” of the platform in order to get user feedback and make improvements. CruiseAlly has raised more than $320,000 in initial funding and is preparing for its next fundraising round in order to fully bring the platform to market.
The company is also transitioning the team so it is ready to move quickly when it receives that funding.
“We’re working really hard on figuring out what our best marketing channels are going to be, what our approach is going to be to break through that noise, how we best communicate the value proposition of the product, and then, of course, getting the technical team ready to bring on more headcount,” Tait said.
In addition to simply making cruise booking easier, Tait said he wants to make the company a major player in the space.
“We actually want to develop some tools to make it easier for travel agents to service cruises in this space because they actually make up a majority of the market. And then we have some other plans for where we might take this model into other verticals within travel and potentially outside the travel industry.”