WSJ -- Trick to Making a 180,000-Ton Carnival Cruise Ship Feel Cozy ...................
Travel
The Middle Seat
Dec. 18, 2019
The Trick to Making a 180,000-Ton Carnival Cruise Ship Feel Cozy
The company is re-imagining small and large spaces while building its largest ship ever, the Mardi Gras, which can hold 6,641 people
How to Fit More Than 6,000 Guests Onto a Ship and Not Feel Cramped
Cruise ships are getting larger and the activities on board more extreme. WSJ’s Scott McCartney visits a shipyard in Finland to see how the cruise operator Carnival is able to pack so much on a ship -- including a roller coaster -- and still have it float.
By Scott McCartney
Where does replacing a nightstand with a small tray for phones give you a shower door instead of a clumsy curtain that sticks to you? On a cruise ship.
Cruise ships are getting bigger and more popular. Yet even with their massive size, every little bit of space counts, especially in small cabins. Sometimes saving inches bedside allows for a significant bathroom upgrade.
Cramming in as many people as possible -- with at least a modicum of comfort -- is the major challenge of travel, whether on planes, trains, hotels or ships. Individual space is on the decline as travel companies try to boost profitability. Think of the shrunken airplane bathroom.
Cruise ships, which now cost upward of $1 billion to build, present a significant challenge: Repeat customers and social media reviews are crucial to the business. So comfort for the masses actually matters, and it drives ship design.
Carnival, the largest cruise company, is building its largest ship, a 180,000-ton floating town three football fields long with 18 decks and even the first roller coaster at sea. The Mardi Gras, which will sail late in 2020, will carry a maximum 6,641 passengers in 2,641 cabins.
“It’s not really packing more in. We are already dense,” says Ben Clement, Carnival Cruise Line’s senior vice president for new builds, ship refurbishment and product innovation.
With ships, like planes, bigger size not only allows more features but also brings more restrictions. The size of large rooms or cabin layout on a ship is limited by requirements for fire doors, for example. More weight means it takes more fuel to move, and fuel represents one of the biggest costs. A big ship still has to be fast enough to complete voyages on time.
In addition, a vessel that’s too large can’t sail under some bridges or use certain ports. The Mardi Gras, for example, will be too big for its namesake port, New Orleans.
“You cannot put a ship in a copy machine and press size two,” Mr. Clement says. “If you double the size of the ship, you cannot double the size of the entertainment, of the dining room.”
Figuring out how to make a bigger area feel small and small spaces feel big are the challenge of many travel companies. Carnival let me explore Mardi Gras in the shipyard where, unfinished, she reveals some of the secrets of putting 6,000 customers on a single boat and not making it feel crowded.
Some spaces become multi-functional. Most big cruise ships have a large atrium in the middle of the ship, a public square to add a feeling of openness and grandeur.
With Mardi Gras, Carnival decided to move the atrium to one side, creating a first-ever three-story glass wall with ocean views. At night, the atrium transforms into a show lounge for 600 to 800 people, featuring everything from acrobats walking on the glass wall with ceiling-mounted rigging to stand-up comedians and musicians. Screens can descend from the ceiling and rise from the floor to turn the atrium into a giant Super Bowl watch party. Benches and chairs, all fixed to the floor per regulation, have been designed for double duty.
The strategy is to make the atrium a more useful space day and night to help disperse passengers throughout the ship. But the placement, crucial for the ocean views that Carnival hopes will make it a popular resting place during the day, became an engineering challenge.
“It’s a rather large hole in the side of the ship,” says Katja Lankinen, the principal engineer on the Mardi Gras project for Meyer Turku, the Finnish shipbuilder. The open space meant one side of the ship would be heavier than the other -- that’s why atriums have traditionally been put in the center of the ship. And the three-story glass wall meant little structural support in a crucial area.
The solution: lighter insulation and other weight-saving moves on one side of the ship, and strengthened pillars in walls and horizontal girders in floors to compensate for the glass wall.
Standing in a long line waiting for food would only cement that overcrowded feeling. To disperse hungry passengers, Carnival is strategically placing restaurants in six different neighborhoods-themed zones where it hopes people will not only go to eat but linger. That’s in addition to the big, traditional seated dining room.
The French Quarter, for example, will have an Emeril Lagasse bistro as well as a jazz club, street entertainers, a fortuneteller and a cooking school. It will be packed into two decks, with a portion of the upper deck cut out so you’ll see people either above you or below you.
“It’s more open, yet you get twice as many things in,” says Brett Vitols, Carnival’s director of new builds.
Another neighborhood will have a brewery and barbecue restaurant. The brewery makes beer on board, a source of fascination for some passengers, but doesn’t take up much space.
The growth rate for the cruise industry tops just about anything in the travel world. Last year, 28.5 million people took a cruise, nearly 7% more than in 2017, according to the Cruise Lines International Association. The growth rate in North America was 9%.
A total of 19 new ocean ships are expected to sail in 2020. CLIA says the global passenger count should reach 32 million.
Some of the higher passenger numbers come with the increasing popularity of shorter cruises -- three- and four-day escapes. And some has come by filling bigger boats. Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas, launched last year, is the largest in the world at 228,000 tons, more than 20% bigger than Mardi Gras, with 118 more cabins.
Mardi Gras will represent a significant step up for Carnival, one-third bigger than Carnival’s current largest ship, Panorama, launched earlier this month out of Long Beach, Calif. The passenger capacity will be 50% larger, 6,000 compared with 4,000. (Its total capacity is 8,376, including 1,700 crew members.)
Carnival Corp. , the Miami-based parent of Carnival, Princess, Cunard, Costa, Holland America, Seabourn and other cruise lines, won’t say how much Mardi Gras will cost to build. The company does say when Mardi Gras opened for booking, cabins were reserved for the initial sailings seven times faster than Carnival’s last new class of ships, which includes Panorama.
Mardi Gras will float for the first time at the end of next month. The steel is all in place and workers are installing heating and air-conditioning ductwork and electrical wiring. Cabins built in a nearby factory are being hoisted onboard intact, slid in through the side of the ship.
Those cabins got their own Marie Kondo-type redesign. An English design firm worked to make them feel more spacious in the same square footage.
Bathrooms grew, largely a result of the bedside table change to trays mounted on the wall. Instead of a coffee table in front of the couch, an Ikea-type ottoman is used. The padded top comes off to reveal additional storage space, and flips over if you want a flat tabletop.
Right angles were largely eliminated -- a wall enclosing the bathroom is curved to give a more open feeling. Lighting was redesigned, with large, round lamps instead of small spotlights. The closet has a pullout shoe rack and more storage space. It’s Container Store at sea.
“Everything we have,” Carnival’s Mr. Vitols says, “we try to use efficiently.”
Write to Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com
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