Our Work›Cruisebound
How Cruisebound unified dozens of cruise lines into one seamless booking experience
Building Cruisebound's Minimum Viable Product
Cruisebound began as an idea, supported by a team of product-focused engineers, and grew into a thriving business generating millions of dollars in annual revenue. Today, the Cruisebound MVP is still in production and now has 27,000+ cruise itineraries, from 19 of the top cruise lines. In 2024 Cruisebound received an additional round of investment funding valued at $13 million.
About Cruisebound
Cruisebound is out to make booking a cruise online simple, while getting you the best deal. As an online travel agency specializing in cruises, Cruisebound offers an online booking experience for the world's most popular cruise lines.
The founders of Cruisebound were the executive management behind RocketMiles, Booking.com and Expedia and they had deep connections in the travel industry. They wanted to validate the concept they had dreamt of for the cruise industry and needed to start with the foundational build of an MVP (minimum viable product) to determine if the concept would work. As a referral, Chromedia met with the Cruisebound team to review the scope and technical requirements in order to fully understand what it would take to build a full custom frontend and backend solution from scratch for this newcomer to the travel industry.
“Every engineer and product manager we had at Chromedia was both responsive and could be counted on to deliver. Every time.
Tyler Barber
CTO and Co-founder, Cruisebound
Project Info
The Challenge
With Cruisebound being a startup venture, the first obstacle was to identify high level senior engineers that could hit the ground running to meet the project's tight timeline and costs within their budget.
The CTO also wanted production and staging to have the exact state (code-wise) and to achieve this, all Pull Request (PR) environments would have dedicated AWS resources (EC2 instances, RDS) and automated tests and manual tests are done in these PR environments, and these environments will be automatically terminated when PRs are merged.
Once the scope and requirements were finalized, it became clear that addressing the complexity and meeting Cruisebound's needs would require a dedicated team — one that Cruisebound did not currently have in place.
Our Process
The Solution
Given that this was an enterprise level MVP of large size and scope managed directly by their CTO, it was decided that Chromedia's Team Software Staff Augmentation service was the best fit for the task. Chromedia began by identifying engineers that best aligned with the project, starting with a seasoned Product Manager who would lead the technical team and interface with Cruisebound on a full-time basis.
From there, Chromedia started creating the shape for the remainder of the team that would consist of multiple tiers of Senior level frontend and backend focused engineers, a Senior level Project Manager experienced in MVP projects, and QA automation engineers. In all, a 12-person team was utilized for the Cruisebound project.
- Team Software Staff Augmentation
- Implement MVP Web UI
- Implement Web API
- Implement Web infrastructure on AWS
- Localize entire Cruisebound app and CMS
- Tests using trusted A/B testing practices
“When we started, Tyler and I were discussing whether to use Django (Python) or Spring Boot (Kotlin), and it was decided that Kotlin would be used because of the anticipated traffic load and concurrent operations.
Allejo Chris Velarde
Lead Senior Developer
Bringing It To Life
The Result
Chromedia shipped a functional MVP from scratch within six months and the first cruise booking shortly followed. Chromedia designed and tested the new Cruisebound MVP, delivering a web UI, web API, and AWS infrastructure. The team also localized the application and CMS, and built a robust internal admin tool that would help manage the growing number of reservations.
The team completed the project on schedule, showcasing excellent communication and responsiveness to the Cruisebound leadership team, which helped build a strong and positive partnership.
Over a 3-year relationship with Cruisebound, Chromedia has had the privilege of working on one of its most challenging and industry breaking projects to date.
