Why Virgin Voyages has Welcomed an AI Crew Member

Virgin Voyages is tapping into a skilled crew member’s thinking for its new application of agentic AI in travel, built collaboratively with Google Cloud. Announced at the Google Cloud Next event in Las Vegas, Rovey will be the cruise industry's first AI crew assistant.

As a part of Project Ruby, Rovey will be the first rollout of Virgin Voyages’ broader AI initiative that is designed to address friction points across a sailor’s journey. 

Utilising Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Gemini models and BigQuery, the AI planning assistant will be able to navigate varied factors that shape a cruise decision like itinerary, timing, pricing, destination mix and onboard experiences. 

Personalised answers for all

Rovey’s engineering team started their work, focusing on making the AI Assistant answer cruise questions with more industry context, rather than just making it reply faster.

Every architecture decision follows a line of questioning that asks: “What would a skilled crew member know about this sailor's thinking and how would they know when to say what?"

The end product is an AI assistant that delivers personalised answers and recommendations, helping sailors find the right voyage and 'Shore Things' to do.

Designed to understand where a sailor is in their decision-making process, it responds in a way that reflects what they have already considered. 

For instance, a person comparing cabin categories previously would get a different conversation than one who has not yet settled on a departure region. Meanwhile, someone who had been exploring Shore Things for three days would get something different again. 

The platform ensures the planning state shapes every exchange between the AI and the sailor rather than resetting after each question. Existing systems retrieve the closest match from a static knowledge base and return an answer, after which the session resets. 

Andy Schwalb, CTO at Virgin Voyages, says: “The partnership with Google Cloud gave us both the infrastructure to answer sailor questions at scale and the intelligence to make every answer feel like it is tailored for that specific traveller.

"What we built reflects a decade of thinking about how technology should serve the guest experience rather than be layered on top of it."

Not a simple Q&A tool

For Rovey, Google Cloud provides the underlying AI infrastructure and model capabilities, while Virgin Voyages brings structured data, behavioural insight and domain expertise from complex booking environments. 

This makes the AI Assistant operate as a decision-support system, capable of guiding sailors through a high-consideration purchase with context-aware recommendations, rather than a simple Q&A tool.

Sam Sebastian, VP, North America Regions at Google Cloud, says: “By powering Rovey with our AI tools, Virgin Voyages is able to mitigate booking friction, deliver personalised travel recommendations at scale, and build deeper, more valuable connections with sailors.”

Virgin Voyages is planning seven future expressions of this project to target distinct friction points across the traveller experience from discovery through the voyage itself. These upcoming releases will address various touchpoints on the same platform architecture on a rolling cadence.

Billy Bohan Chinique, VP Global Brand Marketing and AI Transformation at Virgin Voyages, adds: “We have always built this brand from the inside out. Experience first. Everything else follows.

“Rovey is that philosophy applied to the one moment we could not previously reach at scale: the moment between a sailor thinking 'I wonder if…' and finally saying 'I’m going'. Rovey lives in that space. And it sounds exactly like the brand it represents."

The traditional approach often functions as a facade of conversation built on simple keyword retrieval, whereas Rovey maintains a continuous, evolving dialogue with its sailor.

Transcending beyond the traditional chatbot functionality, Rovey’s personality-driven assistance provides a more intelligent path for cruise customers, simplifying what is regarded as one of the most complex booking experiences in travel.