Costa Crociere

Background

As the only Italian company in the sector to fly the Italian flag, and with over 70 years history, the Costa Group is Europe’s leading cruise company. Part of the Carnival Corporation & plc Group, listed on the London and New York stock exchanges and world leader in its sector, the Costa Group includes the Italian brand Costa Crociere and the German brand AIDA Cruises. With 25 ships in its fleet, the Group is headquartered in Genoa and operates globally.

Challenge

The IT infrastructure of a modern ship has become essential and all on-board equipment, machines, and devices must be connected to a single network. This includes coffee machines, kitchen ovens, cabin access systems, video surveillance system, and handheld devices used by crewmembers for onboarding guests. Costa’s data is managed and shared with the most modern IT solutions. In a setting that is far more complex than a conventional land-based structure and fully operational self-sufficiency is absolutely essential, every ship must have servers that guarantees continuity of service in any scenario.

Solution

As the Group has grown, its needs have also changed. This includes an increasing focus on customer marketing and promotional activities. During each voyage, Costa offers its guests a photographic service in the photo labs equipped with the latest technology that is capable of taking tens of thousands of shots in high resolution and professionally retouching them.

“We soon realized the potential of the QNAP NAS solution to manage the huge volume of photos produced during each voyage, so we installed two NAS devices: the TS-453DU-RP and the TS-853DU-RP on each of our cruise ships. One NAS is employed as an archive of past photos and the other as a real-time storage for ongoing voyages. QNAP plays a fundamental role both as a repository that can efficiently manage all these images and a cost-saving tool in terms of saving budget, as printing is only proceeded by demand,” said Boccini.

Result

QNAP provided Costa with dependable continuous data backup to ensure that customer photos are never lost, helping to maintain guest satisfaction and supporting an important marketing and commercial activity. By integrating QNAP’s face recognition technology, Costa has also improved the efficiency of their photo lab management processes.

Boccini said “In the past, the search took place manually on the printed photos and any rejected photos were discarded. But now the application is able to recognize the customer's face to display only the photos including them. This process is performed in real-time and returns photos that have been professionally retouched and ready to be purchased.”

Having discovered the potential of the QNAP NAS solution and the possibility of integration and centralized management of all 50 QNAP NAS devices using the Qcenter app, other QNAP devices were then installed on board as servers for storing entertainment media (films, music, videos, etc.). Onshore NAS including the headquarters in Genoa, the logistics area and some remote offices could also be centrally managed.

“We are very satisfied with QNAP, both in terms of its performance and the robustness of products. The incidence of failures is extremely low, even below our expected levels, although no special measures have ever been taken. The user-friendliness was also a big plus in the choice of new implementations, as there are no crewmembers with dedicated IT skills.”