By Virginia López Valiente
Managing Director of Cruises News Media Group and Editor of CruisesNews magazine
Editorial from CruisesNews magazine no. 38 – September 2016
There are 70 cruise ships scheduled to be built before 2026 (this number may have increased by the time you read this editorial), and virtually all of them will be built in Europe. This figure does not include the numerous river cruise ships that will be launched in the coming years.
Who said anything about saturation!
At the upcoming International Cruise Summit, we'll try to analyze where all these cruise passengers are coming from, to see if we can delve deeper into the issue. What is certain is that European shipyards have been blessed by the cruise industry, and we must applaud the government efforts of some countries, like France, to maintain their shipbuilding industry. Now, the bottleneck is in manufacturing.
Building a modern cruise ship is no easy feat, not just because of their size, but because of all the extra features they include. There's no longer (and I'm speaking generally) just a restaurant, a swimming pool, a theater, or an ice cream parlor, but rather water parks and theme parks peppered with dozens of dining options and gadgets of every kind. A floating hotel? Hotels can only dream of that!
What I would give to see those "brainstorming" meetings (I suppose that's what they're like, or I don't see how) where designers, technicians, engineers, enlightened ones and bosses, especially bosses, sit around a table to invent something else (that the others don't have) to put on their ship.
What if…? What do you think? Those words that begin sentences full of enthusiasm and endless crazy ideas seeking approval. Zeppelins, articulated arms emerging from the ship, surfing, zip lines, wind tunnels, virtual reality, robots—it doesn't matter, we haven't seen it all.
Even so, I'm thrilled (if you'll excuse the redundancy) by the basics, by what everyone has in common. On my last visit to a shipyard, I had the opportunity to see a ship that was finished on the outside and had its essential components inside. I was able to walk through those dark corridors without clothes and go down to the dry dock and move around under the propellers before they opened the gate to fill the dock. Before dawn, I witnessed the float-out maneuver. The dry dock is filled and opened so that the ship, pushed only by seven strategically placed tugboats, leaves and heads to the new dock where it will be fully completed. All this without engines, relying on inertia and skill.
And I was taking a picture with a glass of French champagne (because we were in France, after all) as dawn broke over the Loire estuary, which I immortalized on Instagram #earlymorningsworthit.
You might say, "What strange things excite me," and you'd be right, what nonsense! But working in this wonderful industry, I travel from one end of the world to the other to see and do basically the same thing, trip after trip. This really got to me. What can you do?
