Royal Caribbean's Fain on cruising's future: 'It will evolve'

Johanna Jainchill

There has been endless speculation about what cruising will be like when ships set sail once again. Will they have buffets? Fewer passengers? Pool-deck dance parties?

Cruise lines have hinted in recent weeks about a few of the changes that can certainly be expected, and they have promised that more protocols and processes are being discussed.

But in Royal Caribbean International's senior vice president of sales Vicki Freed's weekly Coffee Chat with travel advisors, her guest, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. CEO Richard Fain, used the example of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to make the point that while cruising will change, what makes cruising fundamentally what it is will not.

"People think this will morph into something that is very different," he told advisors. "I don't see it that way.

"Cruise travel has evolved, I'm happy to say, and I think Royal has been in the lead in having the cruise experience evolve," he continued. "So cruising two months ago was very different than it was two years ago or five years ago. We had been enhancing the product, and continuous improvement is in our blood."

And yes, he said, things will be different -- such as buffets. "The idea that you'll go into a buffet that everyone reaches in and touches the same tongs, I think it's very likely you're not going to see that on land or at sea. But it doesn't mean that you don't have a buffet. You might have it where all of that is served to you by other people.

"The point is, it will evolve."

And here's where 9/11 comes in.

"After 9/11, all of a sudden you had to do strip searches at the airport, you couldn't take a bottle of water on the plane, our whole world was changing," he said. "People said, 'nobody will ever fly if they have to take off their shoes, their belt and everything else.' And other people looked back and said, 'you had 9/11 but nothing changed. We were are all back flying again.'"

Fain contended that both views were wrong. "Airplane travel didn't end. In fact, it grew. But it evolved, and it isn't the same. You do go through security and identification checks and frankly, we've become accustomed to it and the technology has helped make that easier.

"I think the same thing will happen on the cruise ships," he said. "It won't be exactly as it was before." He specifically mentioned Royal's Excalibur touchless systems that will enable passengers to sign for bills without contact. 

Fain made a similar point to Wall Street analysts during the line's first quarter earnings call, where he applied it to the travel industry at large.

"In a post-Covid-19 world, travel and tourism will grow, but not by reverting to what it was, but by adjusting to a world where all activities, everything we do in the world, will have changed," he said. "Our industry is resilient, and we will come back strong. We'll do so not by mimicking what we used to do but by innovating our product to meeting the exciting demands of the world as it is."