Expedia Cruises Deals & Cruise Search

Purpose

This skill operates on Expedia Cruises (expediacruises.com) to do three related, read-only things: (1) pull the current "Deals of the Week" offers, (2) search live cruise sailings by destination, cruise line, ship, dates, or duration, and (3) open a specific cruise's per-cabin pricing and the start of its booking flow. It returns structured data — deal cards, sailing-search result rows, and itinerary/pricing detail — and stops before any payment or booking submission. Expedia Cruises is a franchise travel-agency network, so the consumer-facing site is split between a server-rendered corporate marketing site (www.expediacruises.com/en-us/corporate/...) and a separate JS booking engine (bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/...); this skill uses the cheapest reliable method for each half.

When to Use

"What cruise deals does Expedia Cruises have this week?" — extract the Deals-of-the-Week cards (itinerary, line, ship, dates, starting price).
"Find me cruises to the Caribbean / on Royal Caribbean / on a specific ship, cheapest first" — run the sailing search and read result rows with per-cabin prices.
"How much is cruise X / what does the booking flow look like?" — open a package/itinerary page for per-person pricing (Inside/Outside/Balcony/Suite) and bonus offers.
"Get me a quote for this cruise" — surface the Request-a-Quote link (routes to a human travel agent, no payment).
NOT for: completing a purchase, entering guest/passenger details, or submitting payment. Stop at the pricing/availability screen.

Workflow

There are two surfaces. Deals and all corporate pages are server-rendered — fetch them. The cruise search + booking pages are a captcha-gated SPA — drive them in a real browser. Use a --verified --proxies Browserbase session for the browser half (the corporate site is behind Akamai and the booking engine behind reCaptcha/Turnstile + a 429 rate limiter).

A. Pull the deals (fetch — fastest, no JS, no captcha)

Fetch the deals page directly — do not start at the bare domain (it redirect-chains through three hostnames; see Gotchas):
```
browse cloud fetch "https://www.expediacruises.com/en-us/corporate/Deals" --proxies
```
Returns HTTP 200, ~520 KB of fully-rendered HTML.
Parse each "Deals of the Week" card. Per card you get: itinerary title (e.g. 5 Night Caribbean Western Cruise), ports (Tampa → Costa Maya → Cozumel → Tampa), cruise line + ship, departure & return dates, the "from" price with Taxes & fees included, a promotion ID, and two links:
- Learn More → https://bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/cruise/package/{packageId}?siid=1095905&lang=1
- Request a Quote → /en-us/corporate/RequestAQuote?cruise={packageId}&refPage=Deals
Regional/category deal subpages exist and fetch the same way, e.g. /en-us/corporate/Deals/Europe, /en-us/corporate/Deals/group-travel, /en-us/corporate/Deals/guided-tours.

B. Search live sailings (browser — the swift SPA)

Open the search engine with query params (it deep-links straight to a populated result set):

browse open "https://bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/cruise?siid=1095905&lang=1&destinationType=All&sortColumn=price&sortOrder=asc" --remote
browse wait timeout 8000 --remote   # SPA renders + populates result rows

Read the N Sailings Found count (e.g. "63,724 Sailings Found") and scroll to the result rows. Each sailing row shows a sail date, four per-cabin price columns (Inside / Outside / Balcony / Suite), Includes taxes and fees, and a BOOK button. Extract via browse get markdown body or browse snapshot.
Narrow with URL params instead of clicking the form when possible — they are the reliable fast path:
- &cruiseline={cruiselineId} — filter to one line (e.g. &cruiseline=982)
- &ship={shipId} — filter to one ship (e.g. &ship=15127)
- &destinationType=All plus &sortColumn=price&sortOrder=asc — cheapest first
- The on-page form also exposes Going to / Sailing Dates / Duration / Cruise Line / Ship / Departure Port and a left-rail filter panel (Cabin Type, Cruise Line, Price Per Person, ports).

C. Open a cruise's pricing + booking flow (browser, READ-ONLY)

Open the package/itinerary page (the packageId comes from a deal card or a search result):

browse open "https://bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/cruise/package/1484845?siid=1095905&lang=1" --remote
browse wait timeout 8000 --remote

Read Price Per Person From for each cabin tier (Inside / Outside / Balcony / Suite), the per-person "from … /mo" financing line, itinerary (ports + day-by-day dates), and Available Bonus Offers. The page header is a four-step booking breadcrumb: Guest Information → Category → Staterooms → Check out.
STOP HERE. Do not click BOOK, advance the breadcrumb, enter guest/passenger details, or submit payment. To hand off to a human, return the Request-a-Quote URL from step A.2 instead.

Site-Specific Gotchas

Never start at the bare domain. https://expediacruises.com/ → 301 → https://www.expediacruise.com/en-US (note: singular expediacruise.com) → 301 → https://www.expediacruises.com/en-us/ → 302 → /en-us/corporate. Always request https://www.expediacruises.com/en-us/corporate/... paths directly to skip the chain. URL path casing matters in the redirects (/en-US vs /en-us).
Two completely different stacks. Marketing/deals = www.expediacruises.com/en-us/corporate/*, server-rendered HTML behind AkamaiGHost (X-Akamai-Reference-Id header). Search/booking = bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/*, an Odysseus "swift-v2-prod" SPA served off contents.odysol.com. Don't expect deal data on bookus, or live availability on the corporate site.
The swift search API is captcha-gated — don't try to call it directly. The SPA loads recaptcha/api.js and Cloudflare Turnstile (challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile), and the page config carries explicit rate-limit error strings (rateLimitExceededErrorMessage, "Please wait a minute and try again (429)"). Direct AJAX/JSON requests are rate-limited and security-keyed. Use a real --verified browser; budget an 8s render wait and don't hammer reloads.
siid=1095905 is the franchise site id baked into every booking-engine link (siteItemId in the page config). Reuse the siid you find on the deals page rather than inventing one; a wrong/empty siid can break the search form's security key (error code 429-CSKInvalid).
Prices lazy-load. Deal-card "from" prices are in the server HTML, but inside the swift SPA the per-cabin price columns populate a beat after the result rows; wait for $ amounts to appear before extracting, otherwise you'll capture night counts with empty prices.
destinationType=All returns the full inventory (~63k sailings) — always pair it with a real filter (cruiseline, ship, dates, or destination) or at least sortColumn=price&sortOrder=asc so the first rows are meaningful.
Read-only boundary: the package page's BOOK buttons and the Guest Information → … → Check out breadcrumb lead into a real reservation. Never proceed. The RequestAQuote link is the safe human-handoff.
Anti-bot reality vs. the pre-run probe. The host probe reported "none detected / likelyNeedsVerified:false," but the corporate site is fronted by Akamai and the booking engine by reCaptcha+Turnstile. The successful run used --verified --proxies; keep stealth on. No block was hit during testing, but a bare session is not advised.
No autobrowse trace/strategy shipped with this skill: the build sandbox lacked a real Anthropic credential (ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN was the literal string placeholder), so the inner self-improvement agent couldn't run. All findings here come from direct browse automation + browse cloud fetch, which authenticate via BROWSERBASE_API_KEY and worked normally.

Expected Output

Three distinct outcome shapes depending on which sub-task ran.

1. Deals (from the corporate Deals page)

{
  "success": true,
  "source": "https://www.expediacruises.com/en-us/corporate/Deals",
  "deals": [
    {
      "title": "5 Night Caribbean Western Cruise",
      "ports": ["Tampa, Florida", "Costa Maya, Mexico", "Cozumel, Mexico", "Tampa, Florida"],
      "cruise_line": "MSC Cruises",
      "ship": "MSC Seascape",
      "depart": "Jul 26, 2026",
      "return": "Aug 2, 2026",
      "price_from_usd": 528,
      "taxes_fees_included": true,
      "promotion_id": "2231584",
      "package_url": "https://bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/cruise/package/1484845?siid=1095905&lang=1",
      "quote_url": "https://www.expediacruises.com/en-us/corporate/RequestAQuote?cruise=1484845&refPage=Deals"
    }
  ]
}

2. Sailing search (from the swift search engine)

{
  "success": true,
  "search_url": "https://bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/cruise?siid=1095905&lang=1&destinationType=All&sortColumn=price&sortOrder=asc",
  "sailings_found": 63724,
  "sort": "price-asc",
  "results": [
    {
      "sail_date": "Sep 14, 2026",
      "day_range": "Mon - Thu",
      "prices_per_person_usd": { "inside": 163, "outside": 229, "balcony": 299, "suite": 668 },
      "includes_taxes_fees": true
    }
  ]
}

3. Cruise / package detail (read-only booking entry)

{
  "success": true,
  "package_url": "https://bookus.expediacruises.com/swift/cruise/package/1484845?siid=1095905&lang=1",
  "title": "7 Nights | Caribbean Western | MSC Cruises: MSC Seascape | Jul 26, 2026",
  "ship": "MSC Seascape",
  "cruise_line": "MSC Cruises",
  "route": "Galveston → Galveston",
  "price_per_person_from_usd": { "inside": 528, "outside": 612, "balcony": 724, "suite": 1865 },
  "bonus_offers": ["Up to $125 Onboard Credit", "FLASH Sale! Reduced Fares", "Save up to 30%", "One Key members earn 2% in OneKeyCash"],
  "booking_steps": ["Guest Information", "Category", "Staterooms", "Check out"],
  "note": "read-only — stopped before payment"
}

Failure / blocked

{
  "success": false,
  "error_reasoning": "swift search returned 429 rate-limit ('Please wait a minute and try again') — back off ~60s and retry with a verified session; do not call the AJAX endpoint directly."
}

book-and-browse-cruise-deals