Fantastic Voyage

The Ship: Design Options

Royal Caribbean has been analyzing passenger comment cards for nearly 30 years. On behalf of RCCL, market-research firm Yankelovich Partners recently asked 1,000 Americans about their vacation preferences. The study, which involved interviews of 60 to 90 minutes, compared cruises with other vacations -- ski packages, family trips, tours of European cities.

All of Royal Caribbean's expensive research can be boiled down to a single word -- options. Americans want a vacation that gives them latitude: They want beaches and museums; they want gourmet cuisine on Sunday and pizza on Monday; and they want to hike in the afternoon and to gamble in the evening.

Voyager and its sister ships were born out of just such insight back in 1995, during early discussions about RCCL's next category of ships, which the company called Eagle. Harri Kulovaara -- who grew up in Turku, the same town in which Voyager was built -- came from a family not of shipbuilders but of lawyers and politicians. Kulovaara, who joined RCCL in 1995 as head of shipbuilding, had a reputation for innovative design and for teaching shipyards how they could build the things that he imagined.

"Project Eagle was relatively unique because the ship's end users -- the guests -- were taken into consideration during the design process much more so than anyone else," says Kulovaara, who was promoted to senior VP of marine operations in 1997. "We spent a lot of time thinking, 'What do we want to offer passengers, not tomorrow but in 2010? What will their lifestyles be like then?' "

One of the earliest additions to the three Eagle ships was a new kind of performance venue -- something beyond the usual theater and secondary show lounge. "What we wanted was a very flexible, very high-tech space," says Peter Compton, 56, director of entertainment for Royal Caribbean. "Plenty of lighting, sound, and video capacity. We wanted a place that was more interactive than the typical theatergoing experience."

At a meeting in 1996, Compton and two of his staff members, Gene Hull and Bill Witiak, were trying to imagine a personality for the big, empty performance spaces aboard the Eagle ships. They were sketching a small version of the modern arena -- a place in which the NBA and Ringling Brothers could be equally at home, a place just as suitable for monster trucks as for Ricky Martin or Mary Chapin Carpenter. Someone on the team suggested bringing in a "glice show." "Glice" is synthetic flooring that works like ice. Glice shows tour smaller U.S. markets, bringing figure skating to places that don't have an ice rink. Richard Fain wandered into the room at that point during the discussion. "Why don't we just put in a real ice rink?" he asked.

"My jaw hit the floor," recalls Witiak, who was once assistant manager of a rink called Polar Palace, in Boone, North Carolina. "I know something about ice."

"That idea really hit the chairman's button," says Compton. "An ice rink on a ship! It doesn't belong there, and it's hard to do -- so we should do it! I remember thinking, 'Thanks for the support. Now how in the world are we going to do that?' "

In dozens of other places aboard Voyager, that same combination of research and serendipity has produced something distinctive. The moment of inspiration in every case was happenstance, whereas the framework that gave rise to that moment was not.

Royal Caribbean assigns the design of some spaces on the ship to architecture firms whose work appeals to the company. For some of the other spaces, firms are invited to compete by submitting designs. New companies -- particularly those with no ship experience -- are hired to work on almost every ship.

Voyager's main theater -- three decks of space visible to passengers and an additional deck that includes backstage areas and an orchestra pit -- is the work of Boston-based Wilson Butler Lodge Inc. Not only had those designers never worked on a ship, but also "we'd never been on a cruise, or even on a cruise ship," says principal Scott Wilson, 47. To complete their work for the competition, they ran to a nearby travel agent and got brochures showing ship interiors. Fortunately, however, the subject that they did know well was theater design, so they treated RCCL's basic specs as if they were the dimensions of an old, gutted theater that was waiting to be rebuilt.

The Vault, Voyager's outrageous nightclub, is the work of an established hotel-and-cruise firm, Yran & Storbraaten Architects, whose offices are located in an old rowing club in the middle of the Oslo harbor. The centerpiece of the Vault is a two-story enclosed dance floor. The inside walls have video screens, speakers, smoke machines, and mats of translucent, glow-in-the-dark tendrils. "It's an enveloping kinetic wall," says Trond Sigurdsen, 41, a senior architect who helped design the nightclub. "It's like a thunderstorm in there." Sigurdsen completed the basic design in one night after RCCL rejected a tamer version.