Rob Casas serves as the Senior Vice President, e-Commerce of Norwegian Cruise Line. Rob started at Norwegian Cruise Line in January of 2018. Rob currently resides in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale Area.

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Rob Casas: [00:00:00] My name is Rob Casas. I've been in the travel industry for over 30 years, leading the efforts of great travel brands in the e-commerce space.

[00:00:36] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:00:36] Awesome, Rob, thanks so much for finding time to join us on the podcast today. We're very excited. I know we've been playing this for quite some time. Tell us a little bit about your backgrounds, career wise, where you come from. And then one, spend a few minutes talking about some of the latest trends.

[00:00:52] Rob Casas: [00:00:52] Absolutely. Thanks, Jahn. Good to be here. My career started back in 1988, and I went to work for Delta Airlines right after I graduated from school college. And my first few years were field operational roles working at airports call centers and so forth. So my involvement in digital started Peck in the mid nineties when I was given responsibility for overseeing the Delta shuttle. ATNS Delta shuttle, as you may know, is the shuttle service that Delta has between New York, Boston, New York, and Washington, very much a high transaction and speed is of Avastin. Back then it was one of the first platforms that enabled instantaneous point of sale reservation transactions as passengers board their flights. So that went on to other projects. Like the introduction of boarding pass readers in the mid to late nineties, and really sort of set me up for then going to work in the companies on the company's fledgling website, which at the time was known as sky links. And of course would eventually become delta.com and where I spent the remaining years at Delta until I left at the end of 2001, in 2002. I took a year off to backpack around the world. And then, in 2003, I went back to work for a tour operator that operated Delta vacations. And at the time continental airlines vacations, and I was the head of e-commerce there. So I joined Norwegian cruise line in the fall of 2006. And along with my predecessor, we created the e-commerce organization at Norwegian with oversight overall strategy, operations, site development, and the director. Online channel sales were there for 13 years. I formally left the company in March of last year and with the pandemic starting to take root and along the way, decided that it was a good time for me to take time off and spend time at home with family along the way, truly where my travel and hospitality roots. I made some investments in a Lake Resort area that my wife and I started and now run in South central Michigan. And it's also the place where we spend our summers. Beyond that, I'm also an advisory board member for uplift a financial tech company that is exclusively focused in the travel industry. So those things get me busy at home. And I look forward in 2021 to continuing to interact and network and, as opportunities come up, see if they make sense.

[00:03:32] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:03:32] That's excellent. Thanks for sharing that background. So you have pretty extensive backgrounds, in the travel and e-commerce industry in general. And tell us a little bit more about what are the different trends and ideas that you're very passionate about that you think will be the next big thing. What are you looking to invest in? What are you researching? Any insights you can share with us or would be, I would love to hear that.

[00:03:56] Rob Casas: [00:03:56] Yeah, absolutely. What comes to mind at the moment is as horrible as this pandemic has been for the world and particularly for our nation, I think one of the outcomes obviously has been the accelerated boom in e-commerce as folks have opted. For online transactions, right. Instead of going to the store. So this is a surge demand for companies really to invest heavily in their e-commerce ope