Cruising’s Future: Broadway, Celebrity Chefs and Overseas Options

Cruise ships today aren’t just gigantic—they’re elaborate floating palaces bulging with eye-popping entertainment, celebrity chefs, and upgraded facilities. Yet according to this wide-ranging interview in USA Today, the CEOs of four different cruise lines insist their ships are only going to get bigger and better.

“We just launched two vessels in the last year, Riviera and Marina, (that) would have been the world’s largest ships in 1970, but today they’re very much midsize. It allows us a bigger platform to do what guests want,” says Frank Del Rio, CEO of Prestige Cruise Holdings.

That bigger platform translates into exploding entertainment options no matter who boards a luxury liner. These industry titans share the importance of hosting Broadway shows that trump the real Broadways shows to what makes a good fit for a celebrity chef on a cruise line to the importance of offering a library with lattes for quiet times before dinner, unless passengers are too busy at the water park or rock climbing walls to slow down. Then there’s the challenges of preventing the deck chairs from remaining “reserved” all day, the debate over the big dining room versus the intimate dining experience at an on-board restaurant (one line serves 1,500 burgers a day at their Guy Fieri eatery), and the best way to visit ports of call.

Though this industry welcomes 20 million people aboard annually, all of these cruise-line CEOs insist they are not competing against each other; rather, their competition is Las Vegas, New York City, and Orlando. “98% or 99% of vacations are still taken on the land. If we’re going to be cutting edge, then we need to understand what’s happening on land,” says Adam Goldstein, CEO of Royal Caribbean International. “When you see the way that we’re partnering with known brands and known chefs, not only in the culinary space but in the entertainment space, it not only says that those particular options are of a high-quality equivalent to what you would find anywhere on land but I think it puts a halo over everything else that we're doing in terms of the overall quality of what the cruise industry is offering to people.”

And it’s not just local land they’re thinking about. In an unexpected twist, more North Americans are choosing cruise ships to see the rest of the world, while more overseas vacationers want to see America by boarding cruise ships. “Any given sailing in Europe we’ll have 85% North Americans and 15% international,” says Del Rio. “But what we find is that the Brits, the Australians, the folks from South Africa or wherever that come onboard our vessels want the American experience. They didn’t come onboard our ships to be given a local experience. So we’re pretty much the same everywhere we go.”

Though the “same everywhere” isn’t the same old, same old. Instead, it’s part of a continuing golden arc into a better, brighter—and yes, bigger—future of cruising.

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