Cruise operators have done plenty to spruce up their websites in recent years yet innovation amongst the online travel agencies has been less prominent.
So, step forward CleanCruising, an Australian cruise OTA which has spent huge amounts of time and effort working out how might visitors want to browse cruise products via the web.
The company actually started offline in 2000 but built a website in 2007 and put the team to work to develop a series of different ways to search and discover more information about the cruises it sells.
Behind the scenes is a cruise mapping engine, built in-house, which covers 2,000 ports around the world and is used to generate routes for hundreds of vessels.
It is used in a number of ways: as a static map within search results but also as a larger, Google Maps-based interactive system so users can toggle between ports and learn more about the destinations.
Okay, so it's a map.
Using the existing data from cruise mapping engine and another Google product called SketchUp, CleanCruising developers have spent the past two years building scale models of over 150 of the world's most popular cruise ships and combining it with Google Earth.
The result is the start of a comprehensive demo of every cruise product on the planet, using HD video to capture the rendered ships on the mapping data.
Officials say the video library is growing but already covers around 7,000 departures around the world for the main operators.
Here's a clip of Royal Caribbean-owned Legend of the Seas on an eight-night trip from Yokohama in Japan to South Korea and China.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCX6OMtEAr8
A wonderful use of some free tools, lots of research and painstaking attention to detail. The rest of the website is pretty good, too.