3
What corporate strategies is
Royal Caribbean
executing in an effort to improve the
customer and travel trade experience, reduce costs, and increase revenues?
Royal Caribbean used a three-
legged corporate strategy “Aimed at (1) enhancing the
customer and travel trade experience, (2) reducing costs (management) saw current
pricing insufficient vis-à-
vis Carnival to cover RCCL’s extra costs), and (3) increasing
revenues. The core proposition was that RCCL customers paid a higher price and, in
return, got a better cruising and vacation experience.” (Page 5).
The first part of Royal
Caribbean’s
Strategy was enhancing the guest experience. RCCL introduced innovations
that significantly helped them improve on the guest experience. The first innovation was
the Silverwhere program. This was a great innovation because it allocated dinner seating
of the cruise ship guest. In the cruises I have been on my family and I are usually sat with
another family or two. What I have noticed is that each time this happens we are usually
sat with people who speak the same language and are around the same age group as well.
This makes the dining experience even more enjoyable. The Silverwhere Program
utilized several criteria like age, nationality, sex, language group needs, and guest
preferences and recommended a set of table groupings as sociable as possible for the
guests. This was no easy task because as many as 3200 guests were on board and many of
them had different sets of reservations at different places, and many spoke different
languages. This program brought together all of this criteria and recommended specific
groupings and therefore provides a higher level of service to guests onboard, as well as
improving the ability
to change a guest’s dining situation swiftly.
In this time and age people are attached to their smartphones and laptops especially if it
is large part of their job. Royal Caribbean noticed this and added Internet cafes onboard,
they saw this as another way they could improve on guest experience. This gave their
guests internet access so they could constantly be in touch with the outside world. One of
the other convenient things about cruise is how the disembarkation and embarkation
process moves very smoothly at is port. This wasn’t
always the case though, these
processes could be very long and frustrating for passengers when clearing the ship at port
where to even to the extent that it could completely =ruin their reaction to the entire
vacation with these being the first and last experiences n the vacation which are notorious
for being the most c
ritical in regards of the guests total experience. “RCCL’s introduction
of the debark card improved debarkation time by two hours. The debark card captured the
information required by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was printed the
night before the debarkation and delivered to each guest room.” (Page 5).
