The Cruise Globe - An Interactive Cruise Archive

For passionate cruise-goers, every voyage is more than just a trip—it’s a treasure of memories. The Cruise Maps company recognises this and helps travellers relive their journeys with custom cruise maps, leveraging real shipping data to capture exact routes. With a growing user community, they saw an opportunity: what if enthusiasts could build a digital archive of their cruise adventures and explore their past voyages interactively?

The Cruise Maps team had created a basic prototype that placed real shipping data onto a 3D globe visualisation. However, they were unsure how to evolve this prototype into a large-scale web application capable of handling personalised user data, secure accounts, and a consistent experience across various devices. They also needed a mechanism to use the processed and verified data from their mapping production system, ensuring users would always receive up-to-date and accurate ship-tracking data for their cruise history. Having successfully collaborated on the Nautical Mapper project, The Cruise Maps company approached Tech Relays to transform the prototype into a fully fledged product.

Tech Relays began by understanding The Cruise Maps team’s core user journeys and visuals. The next step involved researching the right technology stack to operate the application at scale. Tech Relays then drafted a system architecture document to outline how Mapbox, Supabase, AWS, Shopify and Nautical Mapper would integrate. With the MVP backlog defined, the teams worked in agile iterations to build and refine the product. One of the crucial design elements was implementing straightforward authentication, and Supabase Auth was chosen for its ease in quickly integrating single sign-on (SSO) providers.

A key technical challenge was generating the popular share cruise card feature. This required running the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm to simplify and smooth shipping data before sending it to Mapbox, which then rendered an image of the cruise on the globe using a custom Cruise Maps style. That image was instantly returned, placed onto a cruise ticket graphic, and paired with relevant cruise details. This process was triggered on-demand when a user hit the Share button, using Python image manipulation to generate fun, shareable visuals in real time.

By closely collaborating with The Cruise Maps team and leveraging existing systems, Tech Relays rapidly delivered a high-quality, cross-platform digital product that has already delighted thousands of users. The Beta release of the Cruise Globe has drawn more than 10,000 users, each documenting their cruise history. "Our customers rave about the Cruise Globe, saying there is nothing else like it in the industry, and they have shared it over 1,000 times on social media. Tech Relays has been there to assist and guide us whenever challenging situations arise." - The Cruise Maps.

The collaboration between Tech Relays and The Cruise Maps resulted in the successful transformation of a prototype into a fully functional, scalable web application. By combining user-friendly authentication, seamless data processing & integrations, and engaging visuals, the Cruise Globe has provided users with a unique way to document and share their cruise experiences. With 10,000+ users actively engaging with the platform and over 1,000 social media shares, the Cruise Globe has already made a significant impact in the cruise travel space.