Virgin Voyages

I’ve been cruising with VV for 4 years now and this app has more or less been the same throughout. The app looks great and you can tell they’ve invested a lot of money in the UX design of this app. Finding information about the ship and what’s happening on the boat is pretty intuitive… but that’s if the app loads. This development team has not put the time and effort into working on server load or weak connections, which for a business like this is so critical. Before you get on the boat, reservations come in waves that drop at midnight, but this app can absolutely not handle the load. We’re probably talking about only a couple hundred users simultaneously using the app, and they continue to not be prepared. And then once you get on the ship, where the download/upload speeds of the free WiFi are so slow, the app is not optimized under these conditions. You’ll be waiting for 10-15 seconds between page loads where being able to perform actions onboard are even more critical. A lot of my criticism comes from being an app developer myself where I believe if there was investment in app performance over design, this experience could be so much better.

I am currently on a Virgin voyages sailing and while this app is much better than the older sailor app this one still has many issues especially while you’re on board. First, it crashes all of the time! Like, you can’t even browse the event lineup and see what’s going on without it crashing 3-4 times on you. Second, there are WAY too many notifications while you’re on board. Every 30 minutes to an hour I’m getting a notification about booking a shore excursion or booking a private cabana or booking my next cruise. These types of notifications are unnecessary and super annoying. We should have the option to just get the essential notifications without all of the “advertisement” notifications. I want to enjoy my vacation without you always trying to upsell me something on my phone. Not a good look for Virgin tbh. Lastly, there needs to be a better way to book, reserve and get on some type of waitlist for certain things like gym classes or shows. It’s super annoying to want to sign up for something, seeing it’s, “sold out” on the app but then you go anyway to see if there are any no-shows and only 2 other people show up. Either make it first come first serve or make some type of waitlist in the app.

Super happy to see what they’ve done with this app now that it’s smoothed out following the release. Biggest thing is the deck map that I noticed and just generally how to review documents. Looks like they are primarily PDF views which I’m a bigger fan of personally. Deck maps are brand new so super happy those are included now. Seems faster than the old app too from what I’ve seen. Super happy to see the improvements and looking forward to my upcoming cruise! (Can’t delete old app yet due to some features not fully transferred still but no big deal, I could see some old people being frustrated by this with “so many apps” on their phone) the the new app regardless is still good!!