From Brazil to Finland, and My Visit to see Oasis of the Seas

I just found out how easy it is to get behind on the blog. And it’s still summer!

It’s been a whirlwind two weeks starting with a quick trip to Brazil to celebrate the opening of our company office in Sao Paolo. One thing that always surprises me is when I say something at a function and then see it in print thereafter. I said to the people at the evening function “Brazilians love Royal Caribbean and Royal Caribbean loves Brazilians.” A week later that quote showed up as the headline of an article about my visit. Fortunately the statement is true. As an aside, Brazilians really, and I mean really, love to party. Our office opening celebration was a truly festive affair. I tried to stay as long as I could but I couldn’t even manage to stay as long as the wife of our country director. And she gave birth two days later!

Just two days after that I was on my way to Finland to see Oasis of the Seas in the shipyard in Turku. I hadn’t been there since the keel laying so it was my first time seeing the ship in real life. If that seems strange to you please remember that our Chairman & CEO Richard Fain, the author of the Oasis-centric blog on oasisoftheseas.com, practically lives at the yard (STX Europe). In fact he’s there again as I write this two weeks later. Richard and I and the senior management of Royal Caribbean International visited the ship together to make sure we were all on the same page with our understanding of Oasis as we approach the delivery and inaugural period.

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BY:Adam|31st August, 2009 17 Comments

Guest Blog: Finding Culinary Talent for 150 Central Park

I must say, asking my colleagues to do guest entries is becoming an irresistible attraction! Of course, I’m very fortunate to have such outstanding colleagues to ask to contribute to this blog. Plus this amazing business has no end of topics to write about. In this particular case, I am asking Frank Weber, our VP, Food & Beverage, to go into more detail on our approach to 150 Central Park on Oasis of the Seas, the most upscale specialty restaurant concept we have undertaken to date.

Frank Weber, VP, Food & Beverage

There is no doubt that the rise of celebrity chefs over the last decade has been a phenomenon which has elevated the interest in food, cooking & dining to levels never seen before. The popularity of The Food Network on television as well as magazines such as Food & Wine and Gourmet is to be credited for educating consumers and helping them to understand and appreciate the art of food, cooking and wine, which used to be the privilege of a few. This has created true celebrity status for chefs and has created a generation of “foodies”.

Over the years, a variety of ‘celebrity chef’ concepts for our ships have been presented to me for consideration. My responsibility is to review these proposals and assess their value. It is no secret that celebrity chefs such as Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck and Bobby Flay are well known amongst the general population and come at a price. Rachel Ray, for example, according to Forbes earns $18M a year!

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BY:Adam|19th August, 2009 10 Comments

Reflecting Upon the Last Several Months of the Blog

After a few weeks of this blog, I asked myself “What have I learned?” and I wrote my impressions to that point in time. After a few months, I’m asking the same question again. Here are some updated comments in no particular order of importance:

It’s nice to receive comments. The passion for our brand is amazing and all the comments are a reminder of this. Of course many of the comments are not positive and some are downright nasty. That clearly comes with the territory and is the flip side of how much people care about what we do at Royal Caribbean International. Any time there are a lot of comments the thread tends to go all over the place and at some point or many points includes angst about what we are doing or not doing, offering or not offering. That’s clearly not going to change although hopefully the occasions where we give offense in the future will be few and far between.

Readers post comments on a regular basis wanting to know what we are going to do about topics such as the combinability of discounts or the eligibility for access to the Concierge Lounge. When I have already given answers/explanations to the best of my ability, as I have in each of these two cases, it’s hard to know what more to write. If we have any additional news on such topics, you will read about it here for sure.

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BY:Adam|12th August, 2009 62 Comments

Personal Travel: Some of My Favorite Destinations

I’m in an airport (Boston Logan in this case). So what’s new? This got me thinking about where do I like to go, as opposed to where do I have to go.

There are still a lot more places I would like to go that I haven’t yet seen. Not that I’ve been a shabby tourist with visits to over 50 countries on six continents. But of the places I’ve been, one thing that surprises me after all these years is that my favorite natural phenomenon I’ve ever seen and my favorite man-made attraction I’ve ever seen are both in South America. I visited both of them 25 years ago and I haven’t seen anything more impressive since on either count.

The natural phenomenon is Iguazu Falls between Brazil and Argentina and the man-made attraction is Machu Picchu in Peru. It’s easy to research both of them so I won’t dwell on the details. Suffice it to say they’re both incredible. A slightly less incredible reminder of that trip is the distinct mark that a Saba ant’s pincers left on my ring finger in the Peruvian Amazon. Still there after 25 years! My wife is sick of that story.

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BY:Adam|10th August, 2009 1 Comment

Guest Blog: More on Deployment

I’ve been threatening a guest entry on our ship deployment process and here it is courtesy of Diana Block, VP, Revenue Management & Deployment, and Chris Allen, Director, Deployment & Itinerary Planning. Diana and Chris also do this work for Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Cruises not to mention that Diana is responsible for the pricing of our cruises. So we’re talking a lot of responsibility. Some of you no doubt would like more specific information on the actual choices we make (e.g., why aren’t there year round cruises out of Galveston?). Unfortunately, for legal reasons we cannot comment on those specifics in public plus we argue so much about these things in private that we don’t want to air our dirty laundry. Deployment issues are BY FAR the most frequently recurring discussion topics at my monthly staff meetings.

Diana Block, VP, Revenue Management & Deployment

Recently, Adam mentioned that readers of this blog have a keen interest in how we decide where to deploy our ships. As he said, this is a particularly difficult task as we have demand from across the US and around the world from consumers to both cruise from near their homes and to visit new and exciting places in the world. Our goal is to provide the best possible experience for our guests while delivering profitability to our shareholders. So, the big question is…how do we do this?

The process starts with a significant amount of research. It’s the feedback of our Crown & Anchor guests, potential guests and our trade partners that guide us on the types of vacations we should be offering. First, we conduct formal consumer research. Then, we actually go through the enormous task of reading every free form comment ever written on a guest comment card about itineraries or specific destinations. We augment this information with post cruise surveys on specific port experiences, and feedback from tour operators in hundreds of destinations, and from our travel agent partners.

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BY:Adam|10th August, 2009 28 Comments

Improving Our Ships to Help the Environment

A lot of great things happen in this business and we often have cause to celebrate. We had good cause in mid-July when we announced the Royal Caribbean International 2008 Environmental Ship of the Year. The announcement came in the form of a conference call to the fleet. It’s a curious experience to be the one who says “may I have the envelope please” to Jamie Sweeting, our VP, Environmental Stewardship.

The really amazing thing is how the ships year after year continue to find new and innovative ways to take care of the environment. Their dedication to do continuous improvement is inspiring.

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BY:Adam|5th August, 2009 4 Comments

From Marketing to Dining - Innovation is Key

I would like to highlight two of our innovations that are unfolding at the moment, one in our product and one in our communication about our product:

Until now, [a limited number of] bar servers have roamed the tables in the main dining room to offer beverage service. As some guests have pointed out, it’s challenging for this number of bar staff to provide timely service to guests before (or after) their meals arrive. On average our staff level for this undertaking has been one bar server for each 150 guests. We are changing this and by the end of August the waiters on all of our ships will have taken over the responsibility of offering drinks as their guests are seated and thereafter. The ratio will become one server for each 24 guests. We are confident from our testing of this change that our wait staff will greatly improve the flow and timeliness of beverage service during the dining experience. This program further increases guest satisfaction by enabling the waiter to place all cocktail and wine orders on one check.

As with many changes, this initiative requires support and training that takes time and there will be inevitable hiccups. We are implementing a core competency wine and sprits training program and ensuring it is available to all Restaurant crew via the internet. The training encompasses Gold Anchor Standards developed for this initiative. After we overcome the initial learning curve and culture change, we believe this new approach will boost guest satisfaction.

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BY:Adam|4th August, 2009 9 Comments
 

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