contagt Wins AIDA Award, With Cruise Ship Pilot Still Ahead

By Daniel Okafor

contagt won the AI Tools & Smart Solutions category at AIDA’s Innovation Hub in Rostock on Sept. 16, selected from more than 150 ideas. The Mannheim startup now has a route toward an implementation study with the cruise line or an onboard pilot.

Nine finalists presented in Rostock, and AIDA described contagt’s digital indoor-navigation system as offering multilingual content, accessible routes and location-based guidance. It could also reduce the direction requests that AIDA’s crew handle all day.

The award opens a sales route, not a disclosed sale. No contract value, ship deployment date, pricing model or bookings forecast accompanied the win, so commercial traction remains a claim waiting for paperwork.

What did the startup set out to solve?

contagt began with a problem familiar to any traveler: students could not find their parked car in Frankfurt Airport’s large car park. The University of Mannheim spin-off turned that friction into an app, then indoor-navigation software for hospitals, train stations and ships.

Benjamin Martin, who handles sales and business development, called it an everyday problem. Accessibility now drives the product, with smartphone cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) helping guide blind users through buildings.

Founder Johannes Britsch said: “AI has changed what’s possible in indoor navigation within just a few years.” His broader goal is to make routes inside a building, station or ship as easy to understand as street routes, including for people with disabilities.

Why image recognition matters at sea

contagt previously used Bluetooth beacons, QR codes and NFC tags, all short-range location markers, and still offers those tools. Its main direction now is visual image recognition, which uses a phone camera to match unique floor patterns; Martin said the approach is not yet fully shown on the company’s website.

“You can think of it almost like a fingerprint,” Martin said, describing how the software recognizes a deck’s pattern without installing a visible code. The company expects the method to work better aboard steel ships, where decks and walls can shield or reflect radio signals and cause beacon-based systems to struggle.

contagt says image recognition avoids radio entirely and has improved accuracy from around two meters with older technologies to roughly 30 centimeters. That is the company’s own figure, not an independently certified result, and the product has yet to complete a ship test.

Martin says ship interiors can be tight and repetitive, which supports a pilot but does not establish performance aboard a ship. The company has proven its system in buildings, where the technology currently operates.

What would an AIDA pilot distribute?

A few weeks after the Rostock event, the contagt team visited AIDAnova in Kiel. Martin said the most valuable part was discussing directly with AIDA’s team and crew the conditions under which the technology could work onboard any cruise line.

No ship trial or formal commercial agreement was announced after that visit. Under the award program, each winner can take its concept into an implementation study with AIDA or test it as a pilot onboard, so contagt has entered the cruise-sales funnel, not scaled distribution.

For guests, the proposed app adapts to the language set on their phones, calculates stair-free routes for people with limited mobility and presents content in Easy Read, a simplified-language format. Martin framed it as ship information terminals in a guest’s pocket and said the team consults regularly with associations representing people with disabilities.

He called immediate understanding for every user the main product-design challenge and said the company has largely solved it. That is a founder’s assessment, not the result of a published usability study involving cruise passengers with different accessibility needs.

Is there a revenue case yet?

For travel sellers, the app is an onboard service tool, not a new booking channel. It could strengthen wayfinding and accessibility, but no study has quantified crew-time savings or linked the technology to revenue.

Martin characterized AIDA as a large, experienced partner following the award. The award mechanism itself promises only a study or pilot, so the commercial description runs ahead of any disclosed agreement. Access to senior operators and crew is useful pipeline; it is not revenue.

Neither AIDA nor contagt supplied audited adoption figures, financial results, a market-size estimate or a cruise-sector revenue forecast. A successful pilot could give contagt a reference deployment in a new vertical, but the immediate consequence remains access to one cruise line’s operating team, not measurable market share.

Martin, who studied sociology rather than technology and jokes that he gets lost in large buildings, still works on sales and business development. Britsch sees indoor navigation as a foundation for new passenger services, while the company’s stated ambition is to make the world more accessible, one map at a time.

The next proof point is an onboard pilot on a named ship and published performance data. Until then, contagt has earned AIDA’s attention and a route into cruise technology, not a deployment or demonstrated revenue gain.