Tom Stieghorst
One of the hottest venues on the Carnival Horizon on its first cruise from Miami was the sports bar, where an overflow audience watched the Cleveland Browns win their first football game since the Jurassic.
Well, okay, since December 2016. But it was a fun moment for football fans, most of whom were cheering for the Browns, not the New York Jets, a home team for many ex-New Yorkers in South Florida.
Sports at its best provides the kind of engagement that cruise lines seek in their entertainment roster.
I’ve seen two or three hundred people around the pool on a Princess Cruises ship avidly watching an NFL game on the Movies Under the Stars big screen. I was on a cruise in the British Isles earlier this year that practically came to a halt for a soccer game.
So cruise lines have been putting some thought into making sports bars appealing. The Carnival Horizon, like its sister Carnival Vista and ten other Carnival ships, has the SkyBox Sports Bar, which seeks to mimic the look and feel of the clubby entertainment boxes at top stadiums and arenas.
On the Horizon, instead of large screen TVs, the long bar has a video wall behind it which fills the entire wall with action.
MSC Cruises has an oval-shaped bar and is chock full of football memorabilia as befits the line’s marketing partnership with the Miami Dolphins.
One challenge for seagoing sports bars is that when there isn’t a big game on, they can be kind of empty. Some cruise lines locate sports trivia contests in their sports bars during the afternoons.
On Royal Caribbean International, the latest solution is to combine a sports bar and a games arcade. The Playmakers Sports Bar & Arcade got a prominent place on the Boardwalk of the Symphony of the Seas when it made its debut. It is now being retrofitted onto 10 other ships as part of its $900 million Royal Amplified program.
There’s no doubt that one objection to taking a cruise is that it might mean missing a big game and the thrills it provides. Cruise line sports bars can’t solve the problem every time, but they at least give cruise lines, and travel agents, a fighting chance to overcome that concern.