Crystal Cruises' New Website Debuts With a Striking Sophistication Unlike Anything in Luxury Travel
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Crystal Cruises' New Website Debuts With a Striking Sophistication Unlike Anything in Luxury Travel
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Category: Worldwide
This is a press release selected by our editorial committee and published online for free on 2009-05-27
Today luxury cruise specialist Crystal Cruises launched a dynamic new website at crystalcruises.com, designed to convey the elegance and wonder of the World’s Best cruise line. With striking photography, interactive slide shows and unique special features, the new site creates a personal online experience, presenting Crystal’s award-winning brand of service, space, quality and choices with innovative and compelling style.
Immediately engaging, the new site’s dynamic Homepage showcases revolving flash modules of stunning imagery and key promotional messages. From here, users can explore the site’s most intriguing new component, the interactive photo-rich Crystal Experience, as well as descriptive content about Destinations, Crystal Adventures shore excursions, Featured Special Offers, and the comprehensive Cruise Guidebook – an informative combination of the previous site’s Life on Board and Before You Sail sections, as well as Crystal’s worldwide cruise atlas.
Other dedicated sections include a new Voyage Finder plus such refreshed features as Find an Agent, Special Offers, Media Center, Meetings & Incentives, and much more.
“The core principle for the new website design is to captivate our visitors with the wonder of Crystal Cruises, to instantly speak to their interests and emotions and draw them in,” says Nitsa Lewis, Crystal’s vice president of marketing. “Our new online experience is a powerful expression of the Crystal brand, offering compelling and intuitive ways to explore destinations and excursions, and using design and imagery that brings to life the essence of cruising with the World’s Best.”
The new crystalcruises.com represents the pinnacle of luxury travel planning, taking researching a Crystal vacation online to an entirely new level. Key attributes of the site include:
* The Crystal Experience – accessed from the Homepage, this area delivers on its name with 26 visual tours and detailed narratives depicting life aboard Crystal Symphony and Crystal Serenity. In addition to Ships, individual slide shows are also dedicated to Service; Sea & Shore, enriching activities and adventures both on board and ashore; and Society, information on the line’s past guest program the Crystal Society. Here also users may view Crystal Days at Sea, Tour the Ships and the ever-popular Live Views.
* Destinations – grouped into 15 worldwide destinations, including a section devoted to the World Cruise, all of the line’s far-reaching and port-intensive itineraries through 2010 are presented with vivid photography capturing a view of the world through the multi-faceted lens of Crystal. A new roll-over feature allows browsers to glean a snapshot of each particular voyage right from the Destination Homepage, and if interested, click through to an informative page dedicated to that cruise. From any page within the Destination section, users may contact their Travel Agent directly, or request that a Crystal Expert Travel Agency contact them.
* Voyage Finder – among the most exciting enhancements, the new cruise search allows users to choose a voyage by destination, travel date, cruise length, ship, theme, or by all five criteria. As travel preferences are selected, the webpage refreshes with a list of matching cruises.
* Itinerary Pages – from the Destination section, individual voyages are accessed and presented in rich detail (Rooms & Fares, Entertainment & Programs, Crystal Adventures, Hotel Programs) including expandable port links with images and descriptions, and new interactive maps illustrating world location. A new enhancement, Similar Voyages, displays at the bottom of the itinerary page allowing users to consider a greater selection of voyages within a particular destination. Also included are Special Offers and Tour the Ship links, as well as a Recommended Reading List.
* Cruise Guidebook – one of the more unique features to be found on any cruise line website, the Cruise Guidebook models the detailed ‘back-of-the-book’ information provided in Crystal’s annual Worldwide Atlas. Accessed at the top of the page from anywhere on the site, it contains detailed information on virtually every aspect of traveling with Crystal, from pre-cruise planning to shipboard life to the Crystal Society past guest program. The Cruise Guidebook also features a helpful search function and a print-by-page option.
Crystal will continue to enhance its online experience in the coming months with additional innovative features such as a new Shore Excursion Finder, Pre-Cruise check-in area and Travel Agent Center.
Crystal tapped the expertise of Santa Monica-based Sapient, a leading company in the world of interactive marketing, to spearhead the redesign of crystalcruises.com. Sapient’s vice president of business development Jim Magill comments, “It has been an exciting opportunity to work with Crystal to create a new online presence that truly illustrates the level of luxury and perfection that is Crystal. Whether an image, color or special feature, each element on the site is crafted and refined with the same attention to detail as one experiences while on board.”
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