Richard Fain started his history of milestones in 1962 with the S.S. France, which he called “a remarkable ship.” Photo Credit: Jamie Biesiada
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Whenever Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. starts a new project, CEO Richard Fain said the company likes to start with history.
Celebrity Cruises is currently working on Project Edge, which will bring a new class of ships in the fall of 2018, and the line has been considering milestones in cruise ship design leading up to that project — the key innovations in cruising that have changed the way ships are built.
Fain shared some of those milestones with travel agents at Vacation.com’s annual conference at the Diplomat Resort and Spa this week.
“The pace of change has been growing very quickly,” Fain said.
He started his history of milestones in 1962 with the S.S. France, which he called “a remarkable ship.”
“It was designed for transportation,” Fain said, and everything about the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique ship (like its long, sleek design) was aimed at transportation.
Fain jumped next to 1970 and the “transformational change” that Royal Caribbean International’s Song of Norway brought to the industry.
“This was a ship that was really built for cruising,” he said. Decks were open and cabins were designed differently than those on the France — instead of keeping the passengers in them while being transported, Song of Norway’s cabins were designed to get passengers out of their cabins and into public spaces.
“A fundamental shift was taking place,” Fain said, in what the purpose of the vessel was.
Then, in 1975, another influencer came into play, this time in the form of a television show: “The Love Boat.” Fain said cruising was shifting in how it presented itself to the world, becoming open to mass markets.
Then Carnival Cruise Lines came out with Kathy Lee Gifford’s “Fun Ship” commercials in the 1980s. Cruising was no longer something limited to an older, wealthier clientele. It was becoming something for everyone.
The Sovereign of the Seas, “a dramatic new vessel,” arrived in 1988. The Royal Caribbean ship introduced an atrium and more activity choices onboard, and was the largest ship in the world when it was built.
In 1999, Royal Caribbean again introduced a ship that was the largest built at the time: Voyager of the Seas. It had an ice-skating rink and rock-climbing walls, a promenade and a plethora of other activities.
“You wanted things that helped convey that this [cruising] was an unusual activity, that you could do what you wanted,” Fain said. He said Voyager of the Seas was instrumental in continuing to shift the idea that cruising was for everyone.
Fain considered the Celebrity Solstice, which started sailing in 2008, as the next innovative vessel because it brought a level of elegance to a large ship.
And the next year, 2009, Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas arrived, offering even more choices to cruisers. The model in the days of the Song of Norway was dinner, show, bed, Fain said. But with Oasis of the Seas, “that evolved to the point where you have 28 places to eat on board this ship,” he said. It offered specialty dining rooms and suites that appeal to a different crowd, and activities like the FlowRider surf machine for yet another.
The Disney Dream started sailing for Disney Cruise Line in 2011 with a focus on the outdoor decks, and making children the center of many offerings. It introduced all kinds of activities, like waterslides, that many would go on to follow, according to Fain.
Three years later, Royal Caribbean’s Quantum of the Seas added more unexpected amenities to a cruise ship: a gondola-like ball that raises passengers in the air for a bird’s-eye view, a skydiving simulator and the Bionic Bar with its robotic bartenders.
Fain said he believes Celebrity’s Edge-class ships will bring the next milestone to cruising, but was tight-lipped on the details.
Fain’s history lesson was well-received by agents, who largely agreed with his sentiments of game-changers in the industry.
Sandra Cleary is the CEO of CruCon Cruise Outlet Plus in New Hampshire. She started her cruise-only agency 20 years ago, and in her mind, the Voyager of the Seas was one of the biggest milestones in the cruise world.
“We want the ship with the rock-climbing wall,” was a frequent call she got in the late 1990s.
Customers didn’t even know the ship’s name, but were attracted by the many activities it offered, she said. She also pointed to the Allure of the Seas and Oasis of the Seas as game-changers.
Mark Comfort, owner of Cruise Holidays in Kansas City, Mo., said Fain and Royal Caribbean are “arguably the biggest innovators in the cruise industry.”
Comfort says Sovereign of the Seas was the greatest game-changer.
“The design was unthinkable — undoable,” he said. Most predicted it wouldn’t work, Comfort said, but it did, and the “unthinkable” ship went on to change the industry.
As cruise lines search for ways to appeal to younger guests, one item in the toolbox is the app, that downloadable software that makes a smartphone into more than just a device to make calls.
By one estimate, the average smartphone user has 41 apps installed on his or her device, used for everything from calculating tips to forecasting weather or playing games. Now cruise passengers are finding room on their screens for apps from the cruise lines.
Within the past two years, most of the large cruise lines have rolled out at least one app for customers. They generally fall into two categories. The first provides precruise information to help customers research their trip and check out shore excursion or ship info.
The second category is designed to help passengers once they embark by enhancing the onboard experience.
While it seems like they’ve been around forever, apps only really took off in the summer of 2008 when Apple opened its App Store shortly after introducing the iPhone in 2007.
Last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that app downloads from the store had surpassed 100 billion since it opened.
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The rise of apps dovetailed with dramatically increased infrastructure spending by the cruise industry on Internet connectivity at sea and WiFi networks that enabled guests to use personal devices to access the Web onboard.
Because shipboard apps function by piggybacking on a WiFi network, it was only after onboard wireless services were upgraded and strengthened that they could reliably work.
Cruise lines offer their apps for free, and most are downloadable from the App Store for iPhones and iPads as well as from Google Play for Android-based devices. Some cruise lines charge a fee to use the app for chat communication, which is one of the most popular functions.
But unlike WiFi connectivity, which is an additional expense, apps are not seen by cruise lines as a profit generator. Rather, they are considered a service to help passengers make the onboard experience richer.
The Hub app can help Carnival Cruise Line passengers research their dining options while onboard as well as check in on any ship activities.
When Carnival Cruise Line was developing its shipboard app, called Carnival Hub, it boiled the mission down to answering passenger needs at the most basic level, said Gaby Gonzalez, Carnival’s vice president of guest technology and photo operations.
“If you look back at what the app was meant to solve, there were two main questions: ‘What can I do now?’ and ‘Where’s Sally?'” Gonzalez said. So Carnival paid close attention to functions that displayed daily activities on its ships and also provided person-to-person messaging.
Gonzalez said passengers have been pleased with the results, measured by positive reviews that Carnival Hub garnered in the app stores, with users rating it at 4.5 out of five stars. She said about a third of the passengers on ships outfitted for Hub use it.
The idea of the Hub [is] how do you maximize the fun of the cruise experience?” Gonzalez said. “How do you make being on a cruise better because you now have your gateway, your hub to that experience?”
Although it’s very functional, Carnival Hub is currently available on only four ships, the Breeze, Dream, Magic and Sunshine, although the line said the plan is for it to be available on all ships by the end of 2016. Royal Caribbean International’s Royal IQ app is offered only on its Quantum-class ships, and some lines don’t offer an app.
In general, small-ship cruise lines are less likely to invest in a shipboard app.
“If you look at our fleet, which is made up of smaller, more intimate ships and where a majority of them carry 700 passengers or less, it’s kind of hard to get lost while onboard,” said Jason Lasecki, spokesman for Regent Seven Seas Cruises and Oceania Cruises, neither of which offers an app.
The Royal Caribbean app, available on Quantum-class ships, displays events on the daily Cruise Compass.
One of the few lines to make its app available fleetwide is Princess Cruises, in part because Princess@Sea is a website accessible through a browser rather than a downloadable program. That approach made it easier to implement, and it is accessible on laptops, at terminals in the ship’s Internet cafe and for devices other than mobile phones and tablets.
Development of Princess@Sea started early in the winter of 2012 and was timed to launch with the debut of the Royal Princess in 2013, said Nate Craddock, the project lead for guest experience applications at Princess Cruises.
A look at how Princess@Sea functions demonstrates the variety of features that shipboard apps include. The landing page is mostly about events and schedules: times for movies, happy hours, contests and the like. There is some basic weather information for the day and a quartet of buttons at the bottom that lead to other pages with more information.
The events button, for example, takes passengers to a listing of all happenings during the cruise (events for the current day are displayed on the landing page). Users can touch or click on an event link to add it to a personalized agenda called My Cruise Planner.
An Internet button connects to the passenger’s Web account (using Princess@Sea itself does not incur Internet charges).
A Messenger button initiates the chat function. Each user of Princess@Sea has a unique identification number. Users who want to chat with each other exchange these numbers. Group chats are also possible.
The More button is a gateway to a variety of extra functions. Like most shipboard apps, Princess@Sea has a stateroom account page where passengers can view an itemized list of what they’ve spent.
Another page leads to information about bars, restaurants, lounges and the casino. For example, the Adagio Bar page lists hours, displays a menu, has a photo gallery and includes a descriptive paragraph.
A Map It button brings up a deck plan for any location being researched.
The More tab is also where passengers can go deep into the ship’s itinerary. Clicking on a port of call brings up arrival and departure info, a brief description and photos.
A page on Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, for example, includes a selection of restaurants that offer authentic local cuisine, fun facts and how to take part in a sea turtle protection program. There’s information on the port’s ties to Hollywood, tropical birds that are native to the area and a bar where guests can enter and exit on a burro. Another area has other information guests need about where they are docked, proper attire, nearby beaches, shopping, tipping customs, banks and post office locations and emergency numbers.
A general-information page contains a variety of useful items typically found in the loose-leaf binders on the desk of a passenger cabin, things like communications and stateroom services and safety and environmental reminders. There’s even a security section that lists phone numbers for the FBI, Coast Guard and a national sexual-assault hotline.
To help passengers who may not be digitally savvy, Princess has trained staff members who interact with guests to walk them through any problems they have with the app, Craddock said.
Princess guests can request a reference sheet from guest services or at the Internet cafe front desk. Cruise directors include a brief Princess@Sea how-to in the daily Wake show, and commercials for the app run during gaps in programming on the in-cabin TV system.
Although the Princess@Sea website has some features common to many cruise line apps, each line has its own approach. Here’s a look at what some other lines offer.
Carnival Cruise Line
In addition to person-to-person chat, which costs $5 per person, per voyage, Carnival Hub is popular with small groups because it enables joint chats.
“When people are traveling in groups of 20 or so, we actually prepopulate the contacts list that enables that connectivity,” Gonzalez said. “If you arrive together in a group of 20, you’ll already see in your contact list the 20 people.”
For 2016, Carnival is focusing on two things. The first is expanding Hub fleetwide; Gonzalez said her goal is to have that accomplished by the end of the year. The second is to add the ability for passengers to use the app to download and buy shipboard photos.
Celebrity Cruises focused its app on cruise planning rather than on listing onboard activities.
Celebrity Cruises
Celebrity has focused its Celebrity Destinations app on cruise planning rather than on shipboard activities. Its app offers videos and rich imagery of the ports Celebrity visits, itineraries and maps of Celebrity tours, profiles of the line’s shore excursions, interactive deck plans and other planning aids. Celebrity also has a separate Cruise Lingo app that translates useful phrases on a customer’s phone into a variety of languages.
Costa
The Italian line’s MyCostaMobile includes a 360-degree tour feature for each ship and offers free text messaging or phone service to connect with other passengers on the ship using a mobile device.
Crystal Cruises has the Storyteller as part of its app, enabling passengers to edit their photos.
Crystal Cruises
Crystal’s three offerings are not conventional shipboard apps. One, called the Storyteller, is a photo-editing app. Users store or share photos via Facebook or email and can create postcards from them. While using the app to edit photos is free, an Internet package is required to share photos in social media.
Crystal also has a media-player app for watching movies and Crystal-produced programming as well as enrichment lectures, while the PressReader by Newspaper Direct app lets users read U.S. and international newspapers for free while onboard.
Cunard
Carnival Corp.’s staunchly traditional Cunard Line has two mobile apps available in the App Store: one displays Cunard U.K. brochures, and the other houses the onboard magazines.
The Disney Navigator is available for use on every ship in the fleet. Among its features is a complimentary chat function. It also identifies where character interactions can be found onboard.
Disney Cruise Line
Along with Princess, Disney Cruise Line is one of the few lines where apps function fleetwide. Its Navigator is similar to Princess@Sea, plus it has times and locations for children’s character interactions, as well as a drink-of-the-day description for adults. Disney includes a complimentary chat function. The chat does not work on Disney’s Castaway Cay private island, but passengers can view maps of the Cay on the app.
Holland America Line
HAL has an app optimized for tablets that describes its Alaska cruise offerings. Users can explore both cruises and Land+Sea Journeys with a new level of detail, including an interactive map with destination details and excursion options as well as a sampling of the line’s Glacier Bay podcasts.
MSC Cruises’ app enables its passengers to book restaurants and shore excursions through its app along with keeping track of where the ship is heading.
MSC Cruises
Once onboard, guests can download the MSC Traveler app to “friend” and chat with other passengers in real time. The app also enables guests to book restaurant and shore excursions, view sea conditions and weather forecasts for ports of call, check out daily activities and special events, update their location and keep up to date on global news. The app is available on a limited number of ships including the MSC Divina, Magnifica and Preziosa.
Norwegian Cruise Line’s iConcierge app enables a guest to make calls to people off the ship, and an intraship chat is available for a fee. It’s available on 11 of the line’s 14 vessels.
Norwegian Cruise Line
The iConcierge app has functionality similar to the Princess@Sea website. An additional feature is the ability to make calls to and receive calls from people who are not on the ship, though additional charges apply on a per-minute basis. An intraship chat feature is priced at $7.95 per person, per voyage. The app is available on 11 of Norwegian’s 14 ships.
Royal Caribbean International
The debut of the Quantum of the Seas also marked the debut of the Royal IQ app.
One feature unique to Royal IQ is the ability to track luggage through the embarkation and debarkation processes, using radio-frequency identification tags. Royal’s app provides for ship-to-shore and shore-to-ship calls billed at a per-minute rate. The app is featured on Quantum-class ships, including the Anthem of the Seas.
• • •
Cruise ship apps continue to be a work in progress, with lines cooking up new functions and versions. A spokeswoman for Norwegian, for example, said last month the line was working on enhancements but as of press time was not ready to talk about it.
Princess said probable improvements to Princess@Sea include the ability to redeem prepurchased gifts, a preview function for prepurchased shore excursions, a ratings and reviews section for alternative dining rooms and more collaborative tools for groups and charters.
At Carnival, there’s plenty of excitement about the upcoming debut of photo downloading and purchases through the Carnival Hub app on the Carnival Vista, which will launch in May.
“You’ll be able to view the photos that the photographers took of you, and you can buy them right on the app,” Gonzalez said. “This is going to be a fully digital gallery, and you’ll be able to download it on your phone, buy it on your phone and walk away with it.”
Also on the radar at Carnival in the next few years, Gonzalez said, will be the ability to use the app to buy shore excursions. “We have a pretty rich road map ahead so that we can facilitate the cruise vacation even more,” she said.
Samsung has partnered with major cruise line brand MSC Cruises to supply on-ship technology that aims to make the travelling experience ‘smart’.
The upgrade to the MSC Cruises fleet was announced in Milan today but the first two routes to receive the upgrade won’t be in use until June and December 2017.
The MSC Meraviglia and MSC Seaside, consisting of seven ships in total, will be newly built and have a host of Samsung devices and technology added as part of the experience.
According to the announcement, visual displays such as in-cabin flat screen HDTVs, public screens and digital signage will be used throughout. Samsung will also supply mobile solutions such as smartphones, tablets and accessories as well as the medical equipment and expert technology for on-board medical centres, as well as printing solutions.
Samsung Italia president Carlo Barlocco, said, “The partnership with MSC Cruises is an example of how our advanced solutions are able to enhance the passenger experience: not only monitors and tablets to access information and infotainment contents on board but also advanced medical equipment to support first aid in case of emergencies. This partnership, finally, allow Samsung and MSC to bring innovation to the whole cruise industry.”
It’s not the first cruise ship to launch as a ‘smart’ experience. A Royal Caribbean ship launched last year included robot bartenders that created drinks based off orders taken on tablets aboard the ship.
As part of the launch MSC Cruises has launched a new brand positioning and campaign, celebrating the launch of the seven new ships that its building. A TV campaign in Italy, France, Germany and Spain will run with the theme of MSC Cruises being ‘not just any cruise’.
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