Cruise & Ferry Review - Autumn/Winter 2020

1 8 4 from a design point of view we would have to consider what those changes do to the onboard environment. For example, people go to a restaurant to experience the atmosphere. If you reduce that restaurant to 50 per cent capacity, do you lose some of that energy? We don’t know what the future will hold, but there will be solutions. We just have to find them. So you don’t think that large-scale structural changes to a ship are necessarily the answer? AB : You don’t then want to go on your cruise and find that it’s been torn apart when there are perhaps smarter more balanced approaches. We’ve got to be careful that we don’t overreact now when a ship is going to be delivered in three years. Companies need to be thinking further along the road and planning for the best solutions demonstrating careful judgement. AY : I completely agree with Andrew. I’ve heard it being said that we’re going to have to take a cruise ship apart and put it back together again. While nothing’s perfect, I feel that’s far too much of a knee-jerk reaction. I think that the ships that are being built and designed at the moment will continue to work, we just have to consider that for a period of time there will be less people onboard them. There are lots of changes that the cruise industry is making that will be invisible to passengers. Do you think guests need to feel as if more is being done? AY : If the industry is doing everything that it can to make people safe, then I think cruise passengers will be quite faithful. I think that people who have already enjoyed a cruise will come back and be aware of what the companies have done to make them as safe as possible. They will come back because they enjoy this experience. AS : I think it all comes down to communication. A good example is the investments made by cruise lines in recent years in sustainable design. How does a passenger know that these investments have been made? Not everyone is going to walk onboard a ship and recognise those efforts, both with sustainable design and more recent safety measures. So, cruise lines will need to communicate that message effectively from the beginning so that passengers can appreciate it. CFR INTERV IEW “If you have the right team and the appetite to find a solution, the solution always exists.” Andrew Brown