Case Study
Lindblad Expeditions: rebuilding the booking engine
Douglas Cirillo led digital product at Lindblad Expeditions, the small-ship expedition travel company that sails in partnership with National Geographic. He was recruited there by former MSG and Sotheby’s leaders then in Lindblad’s leadership. He led a team of 10 and a $5M portfolio across product, analytics, design, and partners. Within eight months of the replatform: bookings up 30%, booking funnel completion up 82%, qualified leads up 40%.
The challenge
When I joined to lead digital product, the experience had not kept pace with the business. The site was slow and fragmented, and we could not see how customers moved from browsing to booking. Legacy systems made personalization difficult, campaigns could not be tracked end to end, and content changes moved slowly.
What I built first
I worked directly with C-suite and department leads to define and run a multi-phase transformation across the CMS, CDP, DAM, and analytics, with Conductor on search and Optimizely on experimentation. My sequence was the one I still use: data foundation first, then the experience on top of it. We integrated the CDP and CRM data flows, put real-time performance tracking in place, overhauled the UX, and introduced a modern lead capture system.
Results within eight months
Bookings up 30%. Booking funnel completion up 82%, measured from booking start to completed booking, before and after the replatform. Qualified leads up 40%. For the first time, the business could see campaign and site performance in real time.
A later engagement through Gangverk
The work continued through Gangverk, the firm I joined next, which took Lindblad on as a client. My part was the digital and data layer around the reservation platform. This was a separate engagement from the results above.
The program moved the reservation core off a legacy AS400 estate, 30 years of legacy systems and data, to Versonix SeaWare. My team built the layer that connected the new core to everything customer-facing. Rather than accept SeaWare’s standard data warehouse offering, we built a replica of the SeaWare database with an API layer, so Segment and Salesforce data could join cleanly against reservation data. We validated the migrated data against the historical AS400 records before cutover. Algolia search runs over the SeaWare API. A “dates and rates” path connects expedition content straight to live reservations, and customers and travel advisors could complete bookings online, without the sales team as a required step. After the migration was complete, the rebuilt expeditions.com was named a Webby Honoree.
The model and stack from the first chapter still stand and have evolved. Build the data foundation first, build with the people who will run it, and leave something that outlasts the handover.