MIAMI — When it is delivered in 20 months, the Celebrity Edge will offer travel sellers a ship with more suites to sell, better tendering capability, some spectacular innovations and a relentless focus on the sea.
Celebrity's parent, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., took the wraps off big parts of the ship's design in a dramatic reveal for the media and travel partners at the company's new Innovation Lab here.
The event featured RCCL chairman Richard Fain bounding between two white mock-ups of the framing of a cruise ship balcony and a three-story virtual reality simulator that was nothing short of awesome.
Edge is the first new ship class for Celebrity since the Solstice class was created in 2006. Royal has pulled out all the stops to make sure the premium vessel has its requisite share of "wow" features.
High on that list is what Celebrity is calling its Magic Carpet, a traveling platform capable of seating 90 guests for dinner that will be cantilevered off the side of the ship and move between decks.
The 90-ton, covered platform, roughly the size of a tennis court, will change function depending on the deck at which it docks. Uses range from a specialty restaurant to an extension of the pool deck to a loading dock for tender operations.
The Magic Carpet is one element of an overall theme of bringing guests into closer contact with the sea, Fain said.
"The closer connection to the sea is quite important," he said.
To foster that, the Edge will also have a unique design to its balcony cabins, which will be marketed as the Infinite Veranda. The fixed partition of steel and glass between the cabin and the balcony has been scrapped in favor of a thin, bifolding screen of glass, enabling the balcony to be incorporated into the cabin when the screen is open.
At the cabin's edge, there is a glass, half-height panel and an upper glass panel that descends at the push of a button. When that upper panel retracts, the whole cabin is open air.
If the veranda window is down and it starts to rain, "the bridge has the ability to close the window," Celebrity CEO Lisa Lutoff-Perlo said.
Fain said the 918 Infinite Veranda cabins on the Edge will be 226 square feet even without the balcony space, compared with an industry average of 172 to 182 square feet.
That will accommodate more storage, larger bathrooms and king beds. The Edge will also have 16 Infinite Verandas with queen beds for solo travelers.
Suites will expand to 12% of capacity on the Edge, up from 5% of capacity on the existing fleet, Lutoff-Perlo said.
Two Iconic suites of about 2,600 square feet and 700 square-foot balconies will be perched atop the bridge. They will have two bedrooms and two baths, and each can be combined with a Royal suite to form larger accommodations.
The Celebrity Edge, which will be delivered in late 2018, and its sister, the Celebrity Beyond (due 2020), will have a pair of two-bedroom, two-bath Penthouse Suites and six duplex Edge Villas. There will also be 146 Sky Suites, all with conventional balcony doors.
Suite guests will have exclusive access to a sun deck called the Retreat with a private pool, a separate lounge and butler service, as well as to the Luminae restaurant, which is on some other Celebrity ships.
The pool deck, which was also previewed, will debut the industry's first two-story jogging track and an asymmetrical design in which many pool loungers are positioned outward to face the sea, rather than inward toward the pool. There will be six rentable cabanas with 20-foot ceilings and tulip-shaped hot tubs that will be elevated on stems.
A Rooftop Garden with treelike sculptures will occupy the aft resort deck. It will be larger than the Rooftop Terraces on Celebrity's Millennium class and about the same size as the Lawn Club on the Solstice class. It will have a grill comparable to the Lawn Club Grill and show movies like the Rooftop Terrace.
Another advance on the Edge class will be a revision of the shore excursion tendering experience, which will use the Magic Carpet as its centerpiece. Guests will access the Magic Carpet through a Destination Gateway, an embarkation station that will show shoreside highlights on large LCD screens.
The lifeboat tenders will be recast as Edge Launches, with a more stylish design, although Celebrity wasn't ready to reveal any details. When not being used for excursions, the Destination Gateway will be a learning and activities center, featuring enrichment talks, conferences, trunk shows, shopping events and art auctions.
The Celebrity Edge will roll out a portfolio of digital services that primarily rely on the guest's smartphone for functionality. An X-Ray Vision app will let guests "see through walls" to remote areas of the ship, such as the bridge, the galley or the engine room.
The digital improvements will be installed on 15% of the combined RCCL fleet by year's end and on about 50% by the end of 2018, Fain said.
Using the Innovation Lab as the venue for the reveal brought a lot excitement to the process.
"I thought it was the best reveal they've done," said Van Anderson, co-founder of Avoya Travel. "I hope there's a way for the ordinary guest or the travel agent to experience it."
Fain was in his element, showing off two complete sections of steel balcony framing, one that was surplus from an existing ship, to explain the Infinite Verandas
He said one of the most visible changes with the Edge will be the exterior look created by the Infinite Veranda, which eliminates the egg crate appearance of many balcony-rich ships.
"When you look back on the ship, the wall is now a flat wall," Fain said. "It will give you a much calmer look."