Celestyal's new platform for growth and exceptional customer experience

Celestyal Cruises, a multi award-winning challenger in the cruise industry, has its own unique view on cruises. The company is known for offering intimate, immersive journeys across the Eastern Mediterranean, Adriatic, and now, new winter destinations in the Arabian Gulf. With a unique model offering a combination of traditional seven to 14-night voyages, alongside shorter cruises of three- to four-nights, smaller ships and deeper cultural experiences, Celestyal is redefining what it means to cruise - bringing guests closer to the destinations they visit. As the company expanded into emerging markets like the Middle East and Japan, while continuing to serve mature regions such as the US and Europe, maintaining a high standard of personal service became both a priority and a challenge.

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Hospitality and exploration

The company prides itself on a strong focus on offering highly personalised service, with an impressive guest-to-crew ratio of 2.5:1, and an emphasis on warm hospitality and authentic cultural exploration. Celestyal offers an inclusive boutique cruise experience focused on destination immersion, high-quality dining and lounge experiences, and curated shore excursions that bring travellers closer to the regions they visit.

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For Celestyal, delivering exceptional cruise experiences goes beyond breathtaking destinations and high quality service - it’s about seamless service from start to finish. However, their existing platform setup wasn’t meeting expectations. Adoption was lower than required, processes were fragmented and managing leads, contracts, and commissions was becoming increasingly complex.

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Platform for personalisation and growth

As Celestyal Cruises serves customers directly - with guests booking directly, as well as  indirectly (B2B) through a global travel advisor community, having an efficient sales and support infrastructure is crucial to maintaining seamless operations and delivering top-tier service.

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Celestyal’s ambition to scale quickly while enhancing these B2C and B2B customer journeys led them to rethink their digital infrastructure. Personalisation needed to begin long before passengers stepped on board and a digital-first transformation was required to support that vision. Recognising the critical role of data in this journey, Celestyal wanted to build a dedicated data platform to lay the groundwork for growth and innovation. 

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To turn these aspirations into a reality, Celestyal partnered with Gen25. Gen25’s agile, collaborative approach—marked by deep platform expertise and close engagement with the consultants and developers—aligned perfectly with Celestyal’s need for speed, flexibility, and a personal touch. Together, they delivered a robust Salesforce ecosystem that not only improved internal processes and agent experiences but also laid a scalable foundation for the future of Celestyal’s customer experience.

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A smarter, more connected Salesforce experience

Working closely with Celestyal, Gen25 designed a tailored Salesforce implementation that addressed their challenges and made daily operations smoother using the newly created platform. This now delivers advantages like: 

• Effortless Lead & Account Management – A structured Sales Cloud setup to help sales teams track and nurture relationships with travel partners.
  
  
• Seamless Agent Onboarding – A Web-to-Lead form that allows travel partners to register online and be converted into accounts automatically.
  
  
• Frictionless Support – A new Email-to-Case system to help Celestyal’s North American team manage agent queries in one central place.
  
  
• Simplified Contracts & Approvals – Automation with Conga Composer and Conga Sign to streamline contract creation, signing, and approval workflows.
  
  
• Smarter Commission Handling – A structured approval process to ensure commissions are managed efficiently and fairly.
  
  
• System Automation & Data Governance – Integration of Salesforce with the central reservation system, enabling master data management and aligning with Celestyal’s cloud data infrastructure and strategy.
  
  
• Better Data & Insights – Utilising Salesforce data alongside key commercial data to establish powerful reporting via Power BI within the Salesforce UI—making Salesforce a one-stop shop for sales users and data-driven decision-making.
  
  

The Results: A Future-Ready platform for personalisation and growth

With a new, intuitive Salesforce platform in place, Celestyal’s sales teams are now working more efficiently and with greater confidence, using automated workflows which reduce manual work, freeing up time for sales teams to focus on building relationships.

Also with a B2B customer focus, seamless registration process and improved case management they have enhanced support for tehir valued travel partners.

Encouraged by these results, Celestyal will continue to enhance the customer service using their newly implemented platform. With a scalable, future-proof system in place, they’re ready to continue delivering outstanding experiences—on land and at sea.

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At Gen25, we’re proud to help businesses like Celestyal turn technology potential into a company and customer advantage. Whether it’s improving processes, increasing efficiency, or unlocking new opportunities, we make the technology work for your business challenge.

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Andy Wilson, Director of Data & Commercial Platforms, Celestyal on the collaboration with Gen25: “At Celestyal, we have embarked on our journey into cloud data infrastructure, centralising our core systems to create a seamless experience for both our customers and colleagues. Collaborating with Gen25, we have successfully implemented a robust, future-ready Salesforce solution that ensures effective management of our Travel Partners. We look forward to continuing our relationship with the Gen25 team, who have consistently provided best-in-class service throughout the implementation process.”

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🚢  🌴 Want to discover how Celestyal Cruises delivers an exceptional cruise experience yourself? Please visit https://celestyal.com/ie and see the available options.

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