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Website Maintenance - RCI + Celebrity


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Believe it or not, I see all of these little maintenance issues on the website in a positive light.

I knew a guy who did a lot of work on their old databases a few years ago, before I even started cruising Royal.  Like most US airlines it's a pretty complex environment with legacy baggage.

Royal is making baby steps towards a better place - I honestly believe that.  It can't happen overnight or in just one maintenance window, it will take time. 

Just wait...

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11 hours ago, twangster said:

Royal is making baby steps towards a better place - I honestly believe that.  It can't happen overnight or in just one maintenance window, it will take time. 

Just wait...

I'm willing to accept that premise, my problem is that they made the decision not to go in a staged approach that gradually replaces old features / functions with new ones. Maybe this is directly because of the legacy database they were using, and doing a piecemeal migration would have been impossible under any circumstances. But then trust that your customers will respect you if you tell them up front, something like this:

"Changes are coming, and in the beginning some of them may be painful. We have a legacy system that is ancient and incapable of handling what we need with our future plans, and replacing it is not going to be easy. We're going to try our best to keep problems and issues to a minimum, but nothing this complex ever goes exactly as planned; so know that when a problem does come up, we will break our backs to fix it as fast as possible and keep the transition moving forward as quickly as possible. The end result will be a much better system that everyone will appreciate, but until we're there we ask for your patience."

Something as simple as that, posted on their Facebook page and sent in a mass email a month or two ahead of all of this starting, with follow-ups giving general progress reports and estimates on how much longer this crap would be taking, would probably have gone a long way to alleviating much of the anger and frustration all of us here, and everyone around the world, have been feeling for the last several months now. This is as much a PR CF as it is an IT one.

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3 minutes ago, JLMoran said:

"Changes are coming, and in the beginning some of them may be painful. We have a legacy system that is ancient and incapable of handling what we need with our future plans, and replacing it is not going to be easy. We're going to try our best to keep problems and issues to a minimum, but nothing this complex ever goes exactly as planned; so know that when a problem does come up, we will break our backs to fix it as fast as possible and keep the transition moving forward as quickly as possible. The end result will be a much better system that everyone will appreciate, but until we're there we ask for your patience."

This is as much a PR CF as it is an IT one.

No company marketing department is going to sign off on a negative statement that admits anything isn't 100% roses and kittens.

These migrations and upgrades have been pretty painful from a customer perspective.  The scope of the CF leads me to believe it's much larger than the IT department.  Hopefully they've learned some valuable lessons.

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2 hours ago, twangster said:

No company marketing department is going to sign off on a negative statement that admits anything isn't 100% roses and kittens.

Apple more or less did it with their Intel migration announcement, since they had to admit IBM had dropped the ball and Intel was the way they had to go to remain competitive. Of course they spun it into a positive (Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field to the rescue!) and I'm sure RCI's PR dept could do the same in some fashion with a statement along the lines of what I had written above.

My point was just that this should have been pre-announced and managed one hell of a lot better than they've done, so they'd have... maybe not fewer people PO'd at them, but at least the level of vitriol getting thrown their way would be more tempered.

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14 minutes ago, JLMoran said:

Apple more or less did it with their Intel migration announcement, since they had to admit IBM had dropped the ball and Intel was the way they had to go to remain competitive. Of course they spun it into a positive (Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field to the rescue!) and I'm sure RCI's PR dept could do the same in some fashion with a statement along the lines of what I had written above.

My point was just that this should have been pre-announced and managed one hell of a lot better than they've done, so they'd have... maybe not fewer people PO'd at them, but at least the level of vitriol getting thrown their way would be more tempered.

People never like it when you change anything, especially a web site.  Carnival has gone through several iterations each drastically different and was 'shocking' each time they did it.

If these recent changes had gone perfect and everything worked out of the gate people would still be moaning and complaining.  I don't think any company has to warn or notify users they intend to give their website a facelift.  People are upset because it changed.  The fact that it was executed poorly just amped that up a notch.

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On 6/5/2018 at 12:26 AM, twangster said:

Believe it or not, I see all of these little maintenance issues on the website in a positive light.

I knew a guy who did a lot of work on their old databases a few years ago, before I even started cruising Royal.  Like most US airlines it's a pretty complex environment with legacy baggage.

Royal is making baby steps towards a better place - I honestly believe that.  It can't happen overnight or in just one maintenance window, it will take time. 

Just wait...

im a developer.  when they first rolled this out, it was crap.  but, it is getting better, and they are doing this website in the newer more standardized technologies.  heck, i wish i worked for them.

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Sorry, not sympathetic.  I've been on plenty of great websites that are straightforward, easy to understand and intuitive.  Click, click see whatever you need to see and sign up. 

The RCCL website has always been bad, so this is not related to some slow, recent upgrade.  It's time to outsource the IT department.

This is 2018 not 1990.  

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18 hours ago, cruise-y said:

Just tried to book a shore excursion for an August 2018 cruise and was sent into an endless loop that went nowhere.  Page looked totally different than it did three days ago.  Unbelievable.

I booked a cruise planner item just now and after entering all of my details, (like it doesn't already know my name so I get it to enter it twice more), it kicked me back to the dashboard and I was given the opportunity to repeat it all over again.  Second time was a charm. 

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