Costa Cruises last week unveiled its new flagship, the 3,800-passenger, 113,000-ton Costa Fascinosa, and announced new safety procedures instituted in the wake of the Jan. 13 grounding of the Costa Concordia near the Italian island of Giglio. Following the ceremony, contributor Robert N. Jenkins spoke with Costa Cruises President Gianni Onorato, his first interview with Travel Weekly since the Concordia incident.
Q: Less than 48 hours after christening your largest ship, you've just announced a series of procedures to enhance passenger safety. Tell me how the Concordia tragedy has affected the company.
A: The following few months marked difficult days for the company. We managed emergencies [and] changed hundreds of job assignments in order to assist families of the victims and survivors.
We had to take immediate action to protect the environment; offloading the fuel was a multimillion-dollar project. Now we are having the ship removed -- in its entirety, not cut in pieces. The cost was of zero importance.
We had 40,000 future reservations on Concordia that had to be accommodated.
Q: You could not halt delivery of the new flagship, but you also chose this time, with world media in attendance, to announce new safety policies.
A: We tried to be self-critical of our internal procedures and how much time we had dedicated to safety. So we have instituted seven initiatives [that take place] before departure and during the cruise.
As of Feb. 1, each guest must be trained in emergency procedures before the ship leaves the port where he or she embarked.
With his or her stateroom key card, each passenger finds a red plastic Emergency Drill Card. This is handed to a crew member at the muster station, and it is immediately scanned to register all who are attending.
If a passenger does not go to muster drill, the captain sends a letter inviting them to another drill the next morning. But we cannot force them to attend.
Q: How do you describe the new "bridge-management" procedure?
A: The captain becomes more like an admiral, still finally in charge but gathering opinions on navigational matters from the other officers, [who are] encouraged to think out loud and make a more collegial process.
Also, throughout the fleet, each ship's actual route is monitored in real time, at headquarters, and any deviation from the route filed before departure sounds an alarm at headquarters. A call is immediately made to the ship.
Q: You disclosed May 7 that fleetwide, bookings are running as much as 25% above the same time in 2011, despite the Concordia. To what do you attribute that?
A: It is a combination of things. There was a leveraging or prices, then we again began advertising after having pulled ads for months.
And our past customers have sent thousands of messages of support, and many have said they were planning to take a cruise next year but instead are taking one this year.
Q: How do you view the North American market?
A: We will continue to have one ship [the Costa Mediterranea] in Miami in the wintertime, sailing 10 days, into the eastern and western Caribbean. We have a large number of Europeans who fly over, to get warm.