Tom Stieghorst
Going up?
I have a hunch that's going to be a commonly heard interrogatory on the Carnival Horizon, the first ship in the Carnival fleet to feature destination-based elevators.
Destination dispatch is an optimization technique in elevator lobbies that groups passengers for the same destinations into the same elevators. On the Horizon, guests use a small touch screen that activates when it senses a person approaching.
The guest punches their floor of choice into the screen, which assigns a cab to them. The cabs are labeled with letters. The theory is that algorithms that control the dispatch will make more efficient use of the elevator system, thus shortening wait times.
That's the theory. And it would take a scientific study to verify whether it does in fact work that way on the Horizon. But in my unscientific use and observation of the system for a week on a cruise from Barcelona, I would say there's room for doubt.
Take a frequent trip I made on the ship, one from my room on Deck 7 up to the Serenity section at the very top of the ship on Deck 15. It is the kind of trip for which I most value the elevator - a solid seven decks of stair climbing being the alternative.
The hitch is that of the six-pack of elevator cabs on Deck 7, only two run all the way to Deck 15. So punching in Deck 15 automatically puts you out of the running for four of the six cabs.
The best wait time I was able to achieve on the trip was about 1 minute and 30 seconds. The worst was 2 minutes and 40 seconds. That's a long time to wait for an elevator pick up when you're used to quicker times.
What to do? One solution I tried was to punch in Deck 12, the last floor that has service from all six cabs. Then on Deck 12, I had only to hoof it up two flights of stairs to get to Serenity.
The reverse trip, going down seven flights of stairs, was easy and although I sometimes waited for an elevator, sometimes I didn't.
As the week went by I saw guests either asking when the elevator doors opened on Deck 7 whether the elevator was going up, or simply piling in on the assumption it would eventually go their way, and that any trip underway was better than standing and waiting for one to start.
The take-any-opening-elevator strategy also looked popular on Deck 0 at the end of excursions when guests were tired and the alternative was climbing a tower of stairs to get to their cabins.
I think destination dispatch will have the effect of encouraging passengers to use the stairs for short trips of one or two decks, and to combine elevator trips and stair trips to avoid waits.
The whole bet with destination dispatch is that passengers will accept the trade-off between a longer wait time for an available elevator and a shorter total transit time for their entire trip.
Based on my experience and observation for the week, the jury is still out on whether it works.