When one thinks of a holiday, they might think of relaxing on a cruise ship while on route to their next destination. Sipping mint mojitos on deck as the kids play without a care in the world. Well so does Costa Cruises. Costa is an Italian cruise line, based in Genova, Italy founded 1854. They specialize in custom cruises all over the world from America to Europe or from Africa to Asia, Costa has a trip just for you. But you might ask yourself what does a Cruise ship company have to do with Cloud and Cloud Computing?

As the first international cruise company to enter the Chinese market in 2006 and over the last ten years, Costa Cruises has been committed to providing the most authentic Italian experience to their customers. But that's not enough; Costa wants to increase business efficiency to make more and better customer-centric products. For that, they want to leverage the most advanced technology to better each customers' experience. Another challenge for Costa Cruises is to increase the internet bandwidth while on board their cruise liners.

When Costa and Alibaba Cloud first began their partnership, Alibaba Cloud worked with Costa to build an AI platform for Costa's call center. The AI solution which included Natural Language Processing, Question Answer Mapping, and Machine Learning, dramatically improved business efficiency as well as the customer journey. Now customers are automatically routed to their AI customer service platform. Since its adoption, the AI platform has already saved 25 percent in business costs, which Costa has reinvested into more customer-centric products like a cloud-hosted digital newspaper so customers can keep up with current events while on holiday. In addition, to help solve Costa's bandwidth problems, customers, even while deep at sea customers can access a 4G network using their Alipay application.

As Costa continues to cater products for the Chinese market, Alibaba Cloud has been indispensable for Costa, helping them to understand digital China, their consumers, and the overall digital trends that are currently going on in China.