Cruise Search and Semantic Relationships

Royal Caribbean’s search tool is useless. It’s broken. It’s bad. Do you remember the children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? After tooling around RC’s search feature, I’m about to write the follow-up entitled, Kevin and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Search Tool. There will most likely be a lot more cuss words in my edition.

There is evidence of a thesaurus, however. So it has that going for it. 

But it took me a little while to get there. I intentionally misspelled “entertainment” in my first search query, and RC didn’t have anything for me.

Since the Site Search landing page prompted me to ask a question, I decided to play their game and typed in a query in the form of a question, but misspelled the word “types.” Success!

It looks like RC also curates its search results by pulling from an index. I couldn’t investigate that deep, however, for a couple of reasons. For one, there was no difference in search results when it comes to verbs and nouns, or singular and plural versions of words, for that matter. For example, “cruises” and “cruising” turned up the same exact results—even though one is a verb, one is a noun, and the site’s navigation labels contain these two different words and treat them as two different actions. The noun as it relates to the navigation usually is tied to “planning,” “searching,” and “booking” a cruise. The verb is tied to “learning more about” the act of cruising.

The search tool typically organizes results into three categories: FAQ, General and Before You Board. I’m sure there are other categories, but I would have no clue. Why would that be the case? Well, when you click on either “Next” or “Page 2” in the search results navigation at the bottom of the page, you’re met with the following page every single time, no matter what you search:

Yes, Royal Caribbean, I do have a question I want to ask you: Why is your search tool so terrible?