About Departure Day

Travel is booked in pieces

Departure Day is a travel planning and travel intelligence platform built around a simple idea: the trip belongs to the traveler.

Modern travel has strong systems for individual transactions. An airline knows the flight. A hotel knows the stay. A cruise line knows the sailing. A transfer company knows the transfer. A travel advisor may know some or all of the arrangements.

The traveler is often left assembling the actual trip from confirmations, apps, email, calendars, PDFs, group messages, and spreadsheets. Travel is booked in pieces but experienced as one trip. Departure Day is built around the trip.

Built around the trip

In Departure Day, the itinerary is the organizing object. Flights, cruises, hotels, rail, ground transportation, restaurants, activities, documents, travelers, expenses, and changes can all live around the same trip.

The product is oriented toward operational travel management, not only itinerary presentation. It is meant to help travelers maintain the actual trip, understand what is happening, coordinate people, keep relevant documents close to the itinerary, monitor changes, and retain useful context before and during travel.

Travel with other people

Travel is often shared. Departure Day supports individual travelers, couples, households, families, groups, companions, organizers, advisors, and people following a trip from home.

The design principle is simple: shared trip where appropriate, private information where appropriate. A group can coordinate around the same itinerary without assuming every document, note, or financial detail should be visible to everyone.

Better information for better decisions

Departure Day is serious about travel information. The product uses available data sources and travel signals where appropriate, and distinguishes between published information, observed information, derived analysis, and uncertainty.

We do not claim to know more than the available information supports. When a confident conclusion is not available, Departure Day should say so rather than quietly inventing one.

Cruise Intelligence

Cruises are unusually complicated travel objects. A sailing includes a ship, itinerary, ports, dates, arrival and departure times, changing schedules, and surrounding travel arrangements.

Departure Day developed Cruise Intelligence to make cruise information more useful inside the broader travel platform and to give travelers better tools for understanding the cruise market. Travelers can search across broad cruise-market coverage, use Natural Search, explore ships, ports, regions, and sailings, review itinerary information and history, save cruises and searches, and monitor sailings that matter to them.

Natural Search reflects one of our product principles: technology should adapt to how travelers think, rather than requiring travelers to think like a booking system. A traveler should be able to describe the cruise they want, and Departure Day should translate that intent into ordinary search criteria against the underlying inventory.

However you book

Departure Day is intended to remain useful regardless of how the traveler books. Travelers may book directly with suppliers, use an existing travel advisor, make arrangements through different providers, organize an independently planned trip.

Departure Day does not require the traveler to choose between independent technology and human expertise. Travelers can organize and understand their trips in Departure Day while continuing to work with the advisors and suppliers they trust.

Independence

Commercial relationships should not determine what Cruise Intelligence shows travelers. Search results, operational context, and independent scoring should be useful because they reflect the available information, not because a particular booking path is preferred.

Built to travel

Departure Day is designed to travel with the traveler. Web and mobile experiences are first-class, and relevant trip information and documents can remain available when connectivity is limited.

A travel application should remain useful while someone is actually traveling. Relevant documents and trip expenses can stay associated with the trip rather than living in separate systems.