Case Study: Princess Cruises achieves record-breaking bookings and 200% traffic increase with Akamai Technologies

Princess Cruises turns to Akamai for site optimization

Princess Cruises, part of Carnival Corporation—the world’s largest leisure travel company—needed to boost customer traffic and direct bookings while improving site speed and reliability during major promotions. Ahead of a high‑traffic “$1 Cruise Deposit Sale,” the team faced rising CPU usage and caching configuration issues that limited site offload and risked poor user experience.

Akamai Professional Services implemented Dynamic Page Caching, tuned caching rules, and debugged web‑app/CORS logic, moving static content to Akamai’s platform to reduce origin load. The result: offload improved to 87%, CPU usage fell from ~30–35% to ~20–25%, traffic rose 200% (from ~9,000 to ~16,000 requests/minute), and direct bookings hit a record—10× the average daily rate and double the previous peak.

Princess Cruises

Jubil Sason

Project Lead