Posted on September 2, 2005 - by Ralph Grizzle

Ship Shape

What becomes apparent after only a few minutes of talking to the people who design cruise ships is that they are dreamers. After all, a decade ago, who but the dreamers would have imagined that cruise ships today would feature rock-climbing walls, bungee trampolines, human gyroscopes, waterslides, ice-skating rinks and even a planetarium? The dreamers were conjuring up those ideas back in the mid-1990s.And they have many unrealized dreams for cruise ships to come. Joseph Farcus, Carnival Cruise Lines’ chief designer, is still pushing to put a roller coaster on the top deck of a ship. “It would be a very sculptural thing,” he explains. Much like Carnival’s signature waterslides, which spiral down from the upper decks of Carnival ships.

Designteam, a London-based company that contributed to the interior spaces of Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2 and other ships, still hopes that some cruise line will see the wisdom of its proposal: a 250-meter ski slope wrapped around the ship’s funnel and sloping to the back of the top deck.

An “inflatable roof” would keep the manmade snow from melting in the Caribbean, says Designteam co-founder Frank Symeou. The roof would be removed when cruising cold-water destinations such as Alaska. “It’s perfectly feasible,” chimes in Symeou’s partner, Eric Mouzourides, “although the weight of the snow was one concern.” Not a safety issue, he explains: The additional weight adds to fuel costs.

If only the cruise line bean counters, those penny-pinching CFOs and accountants who wield power over every cent spent, would loosen the purse strings, the designers could bring even more activities and features previously unthinkable on cruise ships. “Nobody wants to be innovative anymore because of budgetary constraints,” Symeou laments. “Since 9/11 the trend has been to repeat what you’ve already done and done well. The only innovation is to see who can build the biggest ship.”

And that’s just what’s on the horizon for future cruise ship design: bigger ships, with the biggest of them all coming in the spring of 2006.

Bigger, Better, New and Improved, Again
Readers who turned to these pages a decade ago (Hemispheres, October 1995) would have witnessed the beginning of the large-ship battle. At that time, Princess Cruises was gearing up to launch the world’s largest cruise ship, the Sun Princess. But poor Princess would see her tiara tarnished after only a few months, when Carnival Cruise Lines announced that it would launch an even larger ship, the Carnival Destiny.

Princess volleyed by announcing that it would build a bigger ship, the Grand Princess. A line was drawn in the sand, and the battle was just heating up when in 1998, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. blew the battling cruise ships out of the water by announcing it would build a ship more than a third larger than either the Carnival or Princess ships.

Measuring 142,000 gross tons (that’s right, “measuring” — we’ll get to that in a moment), Royal Caribbean’s Voyager series — five ships carrying 3,838 passengers each — submerged the competition and won the large-ship battle. The new series of ships would be nearly double the size of Sun Princess, at 77,499 tons. Gross tonnage is important to designers because it is a measure of interior space, not an indication of actual weight. The term dates back to 1347, when a tun was a large wine cask with a capacity of 252 old wine gallons. Edward III of England levied a tax, known as tunnage, of three shillings on each tun of wine imported by ship into England. Today, a gross ton is equal to 100 cubic feet of enclosed space.

At 150,000 gross tons, Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2, put into service by parent company Carnival Corp. in 2004, eclipsed Voyager series as the largest cruise ship afloat. The press ballyhooed the Queen Mary 2’s sheer size, and probably no other ship has received as much media attention as Queen Mary 2.

“There’s no question that big ships have a great public relations value,” says Carnival’s Farcus. “There are still so many people who have not cruised, and big ships bring new people to cruising.” Partly by the new features that big ships can accommodate, such as rock-climbing walls on Royal Caribbean and waterslides on Carnival, but also because of the media raucous that big ships create.

Where Big Began: Baltic Sea Ferries
Today’s large cruise ships got their start in the Baltic Sea, where ferries began to test the limits of size in the late 1980s. It’s no coincidence that one of the region’s newest and largest ferries, Color Fantasy, resembles Royal Caribbean’s Voyager-class ships. All have promenades, a main street of sorts, down the center of the ship, and all were built from similar blueprints at the same shipyard in Finland, today known as Aker Finnyards. Because it is more ship than ferry, Color Fantasy no longer bills itself as a ferry. The vessel has morphed into what the company calls the “first-ever cruise ship with car decks.”

Birka Paradise, which entered service late last year, made headlines because it was a “full-blooded cruiser without car decks,” an Aker Finnyards press release read. That ship features a glass-covered sun deck with sun lamps to create “tropical warmth in the Baltic” on the ship’s winter sailings between Stockholm and Finland’s Aland islands. So while Baltic Sea ferries have inspired today’s ship design, so has ship design, or at least the concept of cruising, inspired the Baltic Sea ferries.

Royal Caribbean International now has contracts with Aker Finnyards for three 158,000-ton ships to debut in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Those ships, which will be the world’s largest, will carry 4,370 passengers when fully loaded. Plus 1,360 crew. Not to be outdone, Carnival Corp. intends to build a 180,000-ton ship, internally dubbed the Carnival Pinnacle project.

“We’ve seen some serious competition between the larger operators to make the headlines with their new ships — the so-called “˜wow’ factor,” Designteam’s Symeou says. “That’ likely to continue as an effective way of drawing attention to both ship and brand, and attracting those all important first time customers.”

A new line has been drawn in the sand between two ever-battling companies that practically control the cruise industry: Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., which operates 29 ships under two cruise brands, Royal Caribbean International and Celebrity Cruises; and Carnival Corporation, which operates 80 ships under 12 cruise brands: AIDA, Carnival Cruise Lines, Costa Cruises, Cunard Line, Holland America Line, Ocean Village, P&O Cruises UK, P&O Cruises Australia, Princess Cruises, Seabourn Cruise Line, Swan Hellenic and Windstar Cruises.

Anything Land Can Do, Cruise Can Do Better?
“The fundamental shift in design over the last 20 years has been from vessels designed primarily for travel to vessels primarily designed for entertainment,” says Carl Gustaf Rotkirch, vice president of cruise ship sales for Aker Finnyards. “The cruise industry does a good job of scanning the entertainment industry to stay on top of trends, so much of what cruise lines do emulates what land-based entertainment does.”

The idea, of course, is to make cruise ships destinations in their own right — a ship so full of activities that passengers don’t care where the ship takes them. They may not even want to disembark at ports of call, which would probably suit cruise executives just fine, as the only limitation to how large they can build ships is port capacity. Ever larger ships are challenged with not only how to disperse an immense number of passengers and crew ashore but also how to keep them on board. With a smaller percentage of passengers disembarking, the thinking goes, port capacity becomes less of an issue.

“Are cruise ships getting too big?” asks the summer issue of Seatrade Cruise Review, an industry trade publication. With no fewer than 20 post-Panamax (too large to squeeze through the Panama Canal) ships in service and more than a dozen others under construction, port destinations — particularly in the Caribbean, Europe and the Mediterranean where post-Panamax vessels are limited to cruising — certainly will feel the strain to handle an ever increasing number of passengers. Indeed, U.K analyst Peter Wild says that nearly 300 ports worldwide will need upgrades totaling $3.5 billion to handle larger cruise ships during the next decade.

Slice And Dice Ships
With size being the primary platform for design innovation, even some existing ships are being made larger. In June, Royal Caribbean stretched its 8-year-old Enchantment of the Seas. At Rotterdam’s Keppel Verolme shipyard, workers cut the ship in half and inserted a 73-foot midsection, built at Aker Finnyards and barged to Rotterdam via the North Sea. For a fraction of the cost of building a new ship, the midsection added 151 staterooms, and perhaps more importantly, suspension bridges, a “vitality course with four fitness stops,” an interactive water fountain play area and the first bungee trampolines at sea.

These latter features were partly inspired by Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas. “Every new ship we build forces us into revitalization for the older ships,” says Peter Fetten, Royal Caribbean’s vice president of fleet design and newbuilding. “Somewhere between 10 to 14 years, ships need mid-life revitalization. Tastes have changed, and the branding is no longer there.”

Next spring, Celebrity Cruises’ Century, 10 years old, will undergo revitalization to add 314 new verandas to existing staterooms and other features to bring that ship up to date. At a cost of $55 million, roughly the same outlay as for the Enchantment stretch, revitalization is cheaper than building a new ship (Queen Mary 2 was built at a cost of $800 million).

After 25 years, a ship has typically run the course of its life. “At that point, it is usually not cost effective to keep putting money back into the ship,” Fetten says. “So 90 percent of the old ships will end up as razor blades.” Old ships go to India, where they are taken to a scrapyard known as “The Breakers” for the labor-intensive disassembly process.

The Life Aquatic
The current war among new ships is being waged between Royal Caribbean International’s Freedom series, which the company hails as “our largest and most impressive” ships yet, and Carnival Corporation’s Pinnacle series, which, says designer Farcus, “will help expand the entire cruising market by vitiating the number one market resistance in my opinion: claustrophobia, or some form of it.”

Certainly, these super-size ships appear less like ocean-going vessels and more like resorts with design innovations aimed at making people feel less confined. Thus, such far-fetched notions as ski slopes and roller coasters. “Without extreme ideas, it can be very hard to get people motivated to cruise,” says Designteam’s Mouzourides.

From preliminary plans, Freedom of the Seas, on the top deck at least, appears that it will be one giant water park. When it debuts in May 2006, the ship will boast a combined pool area that is 43 percent larger than on the company’s largest existing vessels.

Of the three pool areas, one will feature “interactive” water features such as squirting fountains and a circular pool with a river-like current for drifting. The second pool area features a sports pool for basketball, volleyball, jousting tournaments, water golf and synchronized swimming. The third pool, a jungle-themed Solarium for adults only, will feature two large hot tubs extending 12 feet from the sides of the ship and 112 feet above the sea.

Freedom will also introduce 20 new categories of staterooms designed primarily for families and groups, the largest being the 1,215-square-foot Presidential Suite. With four bedrooms, its sleeps 14 and features an 810-square-foot balcony with a private Jacuzzi.

Carnival’s Pinnacle project, still on the drawing boards, will be large enough to accommodate features that until now designers have only dreamed of —a roller coaster perhaps?

“We have heard time and again over the years about the promise of a new and very different ship,” says Susan Parker, editor of Lloyd’s Cruise International, “but I am still waiting to see something that really does appeal to middle-aged professionals with money to spend.”

With the new features that designers are dreaming up, her wait may soon be ending.

Sidebar: Are Ships Safe?
You may have read about the 60-foot rogue wave that hit the Norwegian Dawn in April. Though the media hype suggested otherwise, the ship sustained minimal damage — a few broken windows. And that wave was a ripple compared to the 95-foot one that in 1995 hit the bow of Queen Elizabeth 2 head on. Although the wave’s crest hit bridge level, none of the 1,200 passengers were injured, and damage was minimal. Cunard’s transatlantic liners have sustained swells of more than 100 feet in the past.

Ship designers and architects shrug off concerns of rogue waves. That’s because shipyards build durable ships. Could a wave damage the structural integrity of a ship — or worse yet, sink it? “No,” says Aker Finnyards’ Carl Gustaf Rotkirch. “It could break windows, but that’s about it.”