Remarkably
Arabian

The flight from Jeddah to Frankfurt takes six hours. The drive to Bremerhaven takes another two. The IT infrastructure team makes this journey in August 2023, and when they step aboard Aroya for the first time, they are met with a sight that stops everyone mid-sentence.

This is not an obstacle. It is simply the reality of the project. Aroya is being rebuilt at scale, and the technology team must work inside that reality rather than waiting for it to end. They work with Columbia Cruise Services — with Emmanuel Parascandalo coordinating every access pass, every safety briefing — to document what is needed and plan for what the ship will become.

It is worth pausing here to understand what the ship is being transformed into — because every technology choice being made in this dry dock flows from the product vision it is designed to serve.

What emerges from the Bremerhaven refit: IRTH — named for the Arabic word for heritage; Khuzama for fine dining; Amwaj buffet; Layalina for Lebanese-influenced evenings; Bamboo Kitchen for Asian cuisine; La Tavola for Italian. For families: Dreamers for children aged 3–6, Explorers for 7–12, a dedicated Teens Club for 13–17. An Adventure Hub with waterslides, rope course, climbing wall, mini golf. Challenge Chambers with escape rooms, Baloot rooms — the beloved Gulf card game — karaoke, and sports simulators. An arcade with VR and 4DX cinema. Twenty-seven dining and entertainment venues in total. Every screen, every POS terminal, every access point — planned in a ship that is currently open to its framework.

More than 20 IT infrastructure workshops take place across this period, mapping infrastructure requirements against the physical reality of the ship being built around them. The Bill of Materials for the Critical Kit — every server, switch, and access point — is drafted and approved by ExCom during these August sessions.

The 2nd Aroya Project Workshop happens in these weeks — all vendors aboard the ship together for the first time, walking the same decks, standing in the same unfinished spaces, pointing at the same structural frames. This is how the project moves: physically, iteratively, always adapting to what the ship reveals.

While infrastructure is being planned in a ship mid-surgery, another kind of work is happening across four time zones. It is the work of configuration — the slow, painstaking process of taking software platforms built for the global cruise industry and teaching them, specification by specification, to serve a family-first Arabian market they have never encountered.

The Cruise Saudi IT team is in Jeddah. Otalio is in Hamburg. Getslash is in Germany. Versonix is in California. ICEway is managing integrations across all of them. The ship is in Bremerhaven. The business units that need to define how multi-generational family bookings work, how kids-zone check-in safety operates, how a group of eight across three generations shares a single family folio — they are still being hired. So every integration specification is an assumption. Every business rule is a decision made by a technology team simultaneously learning what a cruise ship actually is.

The Otalio team, led by Tony Heuer and held together operationally by Irina Ionita — whose coordination becomes the rhythm everyone else follows — and Vlad Malynovsky, runs more than 100 configuration sessions and 80 training sessions across this period. They are building the operational brain of a ship for a market the system has never served.

Andre Peitz, Nick Kasajonow, and Matthias Plassmann at Getslash build the iTV system for 1,678 cabin screens. Kids' content and sports broadcasts both accessible. Ship entertainment schedules in Arabic and English. Prayer times and Qibla direction built in as standard — not as features added later, but as requirements from the first line of the specification.

The Seaware reservation system — configured by Mac Chala and Versonix, integrated by ICEway — runs through more than 1,000 UAT testing scripts. The family booking that spans five cabins and seven people. The group excursion holding availability across multiple guests. The pre-boarding check-in integrating cleanly with Otalio when the family arrives at Jeddah terminal. Every flow documented, tested, re-tested. 150 business definition sessions. 200+ weekly progress reports to CEO and ExCom. A knowledge base of every training session uploaded and maintained for continuous access.

The Dynamics 365 CRM chapter runs through this period — harder, and with less resolution. ICEway delivers phases. The Seaware-CRM integration does not fully close. The decision to pivot to Zoho One is made with the pragmatism of a team that cannot afford sentiment. It costs time nobody has. The team absorbs it and keeps moving. Sometimes a section of the bridge needs to be rebuilt while you are already past it.

The Aroya Technology project now has two milestones confirmed: the Reservations MVP, achieved. Cruise Readiness by December 2024, the full focus of everything that follows. And beyond — a Visionary phase where the digital experience being built today becomes the foundation for something none of them have yet fully imagined. For now: the booking platform is live, the ship is being rebuilt, and the team has eight months to make everything else ready.

While the booking platform is receiving its first Saudi families, the ship is still in Europe — still being finished. The race from April 2024 to December is the most operationally intense period the MANARA Tech project has seen. Everything must converge: the infrastructure installation, the device deployment, the software go-lives, the crew training, the SOPs, the integrations — all arriving at the same point in time, aboard a moving vessel, before the first commercial guests board.

This period also sees the full scale of crew readiness materialise. The SOP programme — hundreds of standard operating procedures across every department, each mapped to specific technology components — is being validated in real time. Restaurant teams training on Otalio's F&B modules. Guest services teams training on embarkation flows. Housekeeping teams configuring cabin-status workflows. Finance teams validating Adyen POS integration and folio settlement. Provisions teams learning MXP inventory workflows. Every crew member touching a screen for the first time, in Arabic, guided by technology that was built for exactly this moment.

There are ten days between Aroya's arrival in Jeddah waters and her first commercial sailing. Ten days in which everything built over twenty-one months is tested, tested again, adjusted, and tested once more — in real time, with real guests, at real consequence.

The ship sailed. The work did not stop — it never does. The first commercial season reveals what the test cruises could only approximate: the real demands of a fully operational family cruise line, 1,500 crew members, 3,362 guests at maximum capacity, systems that must hold without intervention across every sailing.

The Dynamics 365 CRM wound is healed: Zoho One goes live, replacing what ICEway could not fully deliver. Fasih Hussain, Director of Enterprise Architecture, leads the integration redesign — MuleSoft Anypoint becomes the backbone that every system will connect through. The architecture he is building is not just a technology choice. It is the foundation for every digital experience Aroya offers from this point forward.

Edrees continues building in-house solutions and automations that quietly remove friction from daily operations — the work that only becomes visible when it stops working, which it does not. Ghaida owns the Seaware environment with the authority of someone who has fought through every corner of its complexity, managing internal and external stakeholders with a precision that makes the most demanding reservation system look manageable. Brian Ramos and Melvin Gamara keep the ship's IT infrastructure running voyage after voyage, the quiet professionals the guests never see and always depend on.

Royal Cyber is building what comes next: the CS-owned native app — iOS and Android, Arabic-first, no dependency on Sourcetoad or any white-label platform. Leela Shankar and Adeel Pervaiz lead the build. MuleSoft is the integration layer. Every system — Seaware, Otalio, OneSpaWorld, Adyen, Telr, SparkGo — will speak through it. The target: Q4 2026. When it launches, Sourcetoad is terminated. SAR 712,000 per year stays inside Cruise Saudi.

The team that built Remarkably Arabian from scratch is still here. Still building. Every voyage that sails from Jeddah is proof of something none of them can quite articulate: that it was possible after all, that the bridge held, that running on it while building it was not recklessness but necessity, and that the only way to know what you are capable of is to attempt something that has genuinely never been done.

There is a phrase in the cruise industry: the ship is the destination. For most lines, that means entertainment, dining, spectacle — the floating resort that makes the journey irrelevant compared to what is onboard.

For Aroya, it means something different. It means a family from Jeddah boards a ship and finds a world that was designed for them — not adapted, not translated, not approximately right. Designed. The food is family-focused not as a policy but as a philosophy. The screens speak Arabic not as an afterthought but as the primary language. The entertainment understands a Gulf family's idea of a perfect day — a grandfather playing Baloot in Challenge Chambers while teenagers race down waterslides and children are learning to cook in the Kids Chef Academy. The entire experience — Remarkably Arabian — is a statement about what Arabian hospitality looks like when it sets its own standard.

That is what the IT team built.

Not servers. Not switches. Not SoWs and integration APIs and UAT scripts. The foundation of a cultural statement — the first time in the history of the cruise industry that a premium family cruise line was built from the ground up for the Gulf market, with Arabic as the primary language of every guest touchpoint, and multi-generational family travel as the design principle behind every product decision.

The lighthouse is still burning. The voyage continues. And the name on the bow says everything that needs to be said: Aroya — an Arabian Vision, now sailing.