Sailing into the Future through a Connected Cruise Experience and Experiential Content By JOHN PADGETT, Chief Experience & Innovation Officer, Carnival Corporation
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here’s nothing quite like vacation. We treasure it for the opportunity to relax, recharge and reconnect with the people and places we love. And while America trails much of the world in work-life balance, leaving hundreds of millions of paid vacation days unused every year, studies have repeatedly proven vacations make us happy. That’s one of many reasons many of us have opted to work in the cruise industry— to help make people happy. It’s also why our industry is hard at work to find ways to harness innovation and the Internet of Things (IoT) to maximize our guests’ time and focus on creating more fulfilling vacation experiences, not only on board, but also as part of the destination experience. To the guest, the vacation experience is a holistic experience, a single continuum; therefore we should all be working to ensure there are no breaks along any point of the vacation experience. As IoT is redefining a myriad of the facets of our lives—from how we live in our increasingly connected homes to how we exercise to how we work, commute and 22 FIRST QUARTER 2018 | TRAVEL & CRUISE
play—it’s also redefining how we vacation. Late last year, Carnival Corporation unveiled the first elements of the consumer-centric cruise experience as part of the Medallion Class vacation onboard Regal Princess. This new tech-infused cruise experience is redefining the future of travel and leisure by giving us what we desire most from our vacations: stress-free time filled with the things we enjoy most. The new “Medallion Class” experience is enabled by a first-of-itskind “Experience Platform” that leverages wearables embedded with NFC (Near Field Communication), BLE (Blue Tooth Low Energy) and other sensors in context of a controlled ship multi-sensor ecosystem. Arthur C. Clarke, a brilliant futurist and writer, said, “Any sufficient-
ly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Carnival’s experience platform is infusing technology into the experience environment to redefine how guests watch, play, connect and even unlock their stateroom doors, while never being distracted by the technology itself. Cruising is an excellent platform for IoT deployment; large ships offer well-defined environments and a discrete number of choices that guests face each and every day. Self-contained, mini-cities on the sea provide all the individual experience “verticals” (e.g. food and beverage, retail, entertainment, recreation, transportation, lodging, etc.) that can be staged and executed collectively and holistically, versus individually and segmented as they are in our everyday life. Vacations are the ideal space to optimize our time—our scarcest and most valuable resource. The minute you wait in a line or are otherwise inconvenienced is a minute you can’t enjoy elsewhere. Given that our guests spend months planning for vacations, we want the best experience
