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Sailing into the Future through a Connected Cruise Experience and Experiential Content
By JOHN PADGETT, Chief Experience & Innovation Officer, Carnival Corporation
There’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 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 sufficiently 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
imaginable when they cruise. Now, innovation will take us there.
A connected cruise experience already is impacting the guest vacation experience from beginning to end with:
expanding awareness of and increasing demand for cruising vacations.
Three of Carnival Corporation’s travel series appear weekends on ABC and NBC stations, and rank as number one or number two in their time slot.
Ocean Original series produced by Carnival Corporation and now in their second season include “Ocean Treks with Jeff Corwin” and “Vacation Creation with Tommy Davidson and Andrea Feczko” on ABC, along with “The Voyager with Josh Garcia” on NBC.
This ambitious content production initiative also now includes the distribution of its Ocean Originals TV programming on the two largest Spanish networks in the U.S., as well as our own digital streaming
Streamlined and expedited arrival and Simplified access to staterooms. Improved wayfinding and friends and Expanded gaming beyond casino Enhanced crew interactions.
network, OceanView.
Episodes from the first season of the popular travel series are now featured in “Mi Telemundo,” Telemundo’s new three-hour Saturday programming block that debuted in early January.“El Viajero Con Josh Garcia” has been dubbed into Spanish and takes viewers on an exciting and immersive journey around the globe with world traveler and host, Josh Garcia.
The expansion into the Hispanic market builds on our new partnership with Univision Communications Inc. (UCI), the leading media company serving Hispanic America, to develop the first O·C·E·A·N primetime series, “La Gran Sorpresa” (“The Great Surprise.”) In its first six episodes, the program attracted well over 1 million viewers every week, making it the number one show in Sunday Hispanic primetime TV.
This expansion of our original programming allows us to show even more viewers that cruising not only provides travelers with the opportunity to visit multiple destinations in a single trip, but also offers something for all ages, making it a great vacation option at an exceptional value for kids, families and multigenerational groups.
And to ensure this original content continues to be accessible to the masses, in September 2017, we announced the creation of OceanView, the world’s first over the top (OTT) digital streaming channel from a travel provider for completely free on major digital streaming platforms Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Roku. The streaming channel features a slate of more than 100 Ocean Original episodes that includes our four original series, as well as two new direct-to-digital streaming original series, “GO” and “Local Eyes.” OceanView content is also available on more than 80 of the company’s 103 cruise ships.
We remain confident that these initiatives to develop the streamlined, connected experience and then show that experience to potential cruisers will continue to drive Carnival Corporation, along with the entire industry, to the future. Though we break passenger records every year, we are just beginning to tap the potential—and “magical” technology—on the horizon.
