Dive Brief:
- Daniel Henry joined Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings as the company's EVP, chief digital and technology officer, President and CEO Harry Sommer said Monday in a LinkedIn post. Henry will report to Sommer effective Monday and will be tasked with combining the IT and digital experience teams, the company said in a Tuesday email.
- Henry's appointment will support the company's ability to "deliver seamless, innovative solutions that elevate both guest experiences and our operational excellence," Sommer said in the post. CIO and CISO Georgios Mortakis will remain with the company and report to Henry, the company said.
- The executive brings decades of IT leadership experience to the cruise line, including 17 years at American Airlines and nearly five years as EVP, global CIO at McDonald's.
Dive Insight:
Norwegian Cruise Line's leadership addition is its latest move to expand digital capabilities, shored up by a lengthy cloud migration and the addition of IT skills to its board of directors.
In June 2024, the company announced it completed a 15-month effort to migrate its shoreside on-premises workloads to AWS, moving more than 100 applications — including its reservation system and mobile apps — to cloud.
The move was billed as a pathway toward adoption of generative AI, machine learning and analytics offerings through AWS.
"Our migration of on-premises workloads to AWS has resulted in significant improvements in performance," Mortakis said in the announcement. During the company's largest traffic event to date in November 2023, its reservations systems handled record volumes without any known performance or availability issues, Mortakis said.
The company also credited technology upgrades with reduced costs, CFO Mark Kempa said during the company's Q1 2025 earnings call in April.
"We’ve made some soft minor technology investments that are really allowing us to gain more efficiencies on the back end," Kempa said.
In May, the company appointed Linda Jojo to its board as an independent director. A United Airlines veteran, Jojo brings over 30 years of IT and cybersecurity experience to the company.
"Ms. Jojo’s appointment is a strategic move to enhance our Board’s expertise in technology and customer solutions at a pivotal time for NCLH," said Sommer in the announcement.
