Within my first 6 months at Carnival Australia our main brand got a new website for www.pocruises.com.au. My only involvement that time was to deliver an SQL database with the product data in (automated daily). Today was our first major website upgrade for our main brand in 6 years, and this time I am responsible for a team of developers who delivered just a little more than 1 SQL database. Although there is still a database, and it is still updated daily, we also have full integration with the inventory system, booking engine and CRM. These systems are all brought together in a middleware layer we call OpenSeas. This middleware is hosted in our office's domain and interfaces with all the aforementioned back end systems, in the USA, and provides a secure endpoints to the main site that can be hosted in Azure.
The main website was built by the marketing department and I think they picked a good CMS in SiteCore, and vendor to build the interface. The front end of the website provides all content, responsive design and other SiteCore features. From and IT perspective my team were .NET specialists from ssw, and we were responsible for delivering all the personalisation of data for customers, including discrete prices based on campaigns from the CRM, and also real-time availability and prices from the mainframe reservations system located in the USA. OpenSeas also provides the quote facility to allow multiple products to be bundled into a shopping cart. It's a very comprehensive, yet simple solution.
Launch day and it's a big team effort with IT and Marketing