Tom Stieghorst
Tom Stieghorst

Royal Caribbean Cruises' love for technology is no secret. It is periodically on display at splash events such as last year's showcase at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

But when it comes to implementing new technology, Royal is more cautious and incremental than some of its competitors.

RCCL is determined to offer intriguing new technology, but to make sure it works as promised. An example is the Magic Carpet platform on Celebrity Cruises' new Celebrity Edge, which went through countless iterations before Royal settled on the current design.

Another example is the Excalibur personal service technology, which Royal has been rolling out on its ships, one ship at a time, one feature at a time, for a while now. In a recent conference call with Wall Street analysts, RCCL chairman Richard Fain explained his approach to implementation.

Fain said it is a sort of red-yellow-green light method. Or perhaps a yellow-green-really green combination. Specifically, Fain said the Excalibur app is being made available to guests using a crawl-walk-run model.

The first phase is testing mode. Royal makes the technology available on a limited basis. "The app is up and running, but we keep it very quiet so we can test it out with a small group of participants," Fain said.

Next comes walking. That means Royal is confident enough in the technology to make it available shipwide, but not so confident that it is advertising and promoting it with gusto.

"This is roughly equivalent to the beta stage of most apps," Fain said. "It gives us a chance to test it under real-life conditions but only with a limited group of users."

Finally comes run. "The app is then available to anyone, and we vigorously publicize it so that as many guests as possible use it. When we get to the run stage, the app has been thoroughly vetted and most of our guests use it and love it," Fain said.

A chart shown to analysts indicated that Excalibur implementation was a little less than 50% today, compared to about 20% at the beginning of the year. Of that, about 10% was in the crawl phase, another 20% in the walk phase and about 15% in the run phase. The chart showed 100% implementation by the end of 2020.

Fain said the initial focus has been on using the app to make boarding and disembarking simpler, but that more "bells and whistles" were coming, with facial recognition, the ability to book onboard activities before sailing and an "innovative digital stateroom key" as specific mentions.

The walk-before-you-run approach may needlessly keep technology improvements from some guests, but it enhances the credibility of the overall effort and makes sure that something that's meant to simplify doesn't become something complicated instead.

The bottom line? "We find that using such technology to reduce the hassle factor behind traveling increases the demand for our products," Fain said.

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