It’s hard to imagine an industry more dramatically disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic than the cruise industry. “We as an industry basically stopped, during the pandemic,” says Martha Poulter, CIO, Royal Caribbean Group. “Our industry literally came to a standstill.”
Now, with restrictions lifting and leisure travel resuming, Poulter reflects on how her IT team made the most of the pandemic downtime to address new and existing challenges.
CIO columnist Maryfran Johnson sat down with Poulter at CIO’s Future of Cloud and Digital Infrastructure Summit to discuss the unique technology challenges of “operat[ing] in this world where our core product is at sea.” What follows are edited excerpts from that conversation. For more of Poulter’s insights, watch the full interview embedded below.
On taking advantage of pandemic downtime:
My husband—during the pandemic—would say, “I do not understand why you are so busy. You are not operating.” But we used the downtime to really reimagine what we …