ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Lady June Hillary, the wife of Mount Everest's
conqueror, stood at the downtown ship pier here on May 8, holding a
large bottle of champagne.
Together with Capt. Erik Bjurstedt, she swung the bottle, which
was attached to a rope held by a man on deck, into the navy blue
hull of 1,050-passenger Crown Odyssey, officially marking Orient
Lines' takeover of the ship from its parent company, Norwegian
Cruise Line.
The bottle broke, avoiding maritime superstition that portends a
luckless career for any vessel whose hull fails to shatter the
inaugural champagne.
Indeed, the tension here was palatable in the moments leading up
to the re-christening.
Earlier this month, a champagne bottle failed to break at a
P&O christening ceremony for Acadia. The ship proceeded to limp
back into port one day into its two-week inaugural cruise, a victim
of mechanical problems.
Although Orient Lines' re-christening came off flawlessly, the
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based operator still faces significant
challenges with Crown Odyssey.
First, Orient Lines will have to finish some basic work on the
ship. Workers toiled aboard Crown Odyssey throughout the 12-day
Mediterranean cruise that followed the pierside ceremony.
Orient Lines is reconfiguring a few spaces on board Crown
Odyssey. Several others show clear signs of inattention that first
surfaced under NCL's five-year ownership of the vessel.
In some areas, basic maintenance has been clearly laggard.
During the inaugural cruise, shipboard crew painted bulkheads,
replaced carpets, installed marble around a bank of whirlpools and
struggled to bring the Internet cafe on line.
Orient Lines failed to be finish the work during Crown Odyssey's
two-week dry-dock in Malta. Luckily for the line, none of the
ship's major facilities were affected.
Indeed, some of the maintenance work was completed within days,
and Crown Odyssey likely will have its vessel in order within a few
weeks. Inaugural sailings for any cruise line often are fraught
with similar "shakedown" difficulties.
"Clearly there are still things that need to be done," admitted
Deborah Natansohn, Orient's president. "As things settle down the
ship will become more polished."
A bigger challenge for the line will be absorbing the 130%
capacity increase Crown Odyssey represents for Orient Lines, whose
only other vessel is 800-passenger Marco Polo, whose hull dates to
1965 but whose superstructure, including all public rooms and
passenger cabins, was built separately in 1992.
"We are quite used to going out full with Marco Polo," said
Natansohn. "Our challenge is to maintain the passenger base for
Marco Polo while building it for Crown Odyssey. The normal
proclivity [for passengers] is to go for the newer ships. What
we've done is deploy Marco Polo on our newest routes, including
Scandinavia and South America."
Crown Odyssey, meanwhile, will spend the summer in the
Mediterranean. Between May and October, the ship will offer 20
separate European cruises packaged with land tours. The 12- and
13-day itineraries will feature port calls in Greece, Italy,
France, Spain, Turkey, Egypt and Israel, plus several Black Sea
ports.
Together with Marco Polo, which will spend part of the year in
Europe, Orient Lines expects to carry over 38,700 passengers to the
Mediterranean, a 50% increase over 1999.
Built in 1988 for destination-oriented Royal Cruise Line under
the name Crown Odyssey, the ship was considered a predecessor of
the feature-rich large cruise ships to come.
"Crown Odyssey was called the first ship of the 21st century
when it was completed in 1988," Natansohn told guests in an address
at the re-christening ceremony.
"It was the first cruise ship with a lobby atrium, the first to
replace most portholes with full windows and one of the first to
feature staterooms with balconies."
The ship was transferred to Orient Lines last year by NCL, which
bought the ship along with Royal Cruise Line in the late 1980s. NCL
later shut down the Royal operation, transferring the ship to the
NCL fleet and renaming it Norwegian Crown.
NCL waged a long, mostly losing battle for profitability through
the 1990s, a period which coincided with its ownership of Norwegian
Crown.
NCL finally escaped the spectre of debt earlier this year when
Star Cruises acquired NCL Holding, NCL's Oslo, Norway-based
owner.
Star, the largest cruise operator in Asia, is controlled by a
major Asian gaming company and is awash in cash. Both NCL and Star
already are in the midst of major fleet-building programs.
While no new ships are on the immediate horizon for Orient
Lines, the company's near-term future is assured.
"Star is an aggressive company that will bring NCL into the
limelight as a whole," said Natansohn. Still, she says, "I don't
[see Star's takeover] affecting our on-board product. We fit into a
niche between the high-end luxury lines, and the mass-market and
premium lines, which don't offer our extended, exotic
itineraries."