Fun is not something they take lightly at Carnival Cruise Lines. In fact, they measure it by the ton.
At a Danish shipyard last June, in ceremonies highlighted by herring-laden banquets, fireworks and enough aquavit to float an aircraft carrier, the company debuted another ”46,000 tons of fun.” The $170 million superliner Holiday, 728 feet long with a rakish white hull and a distinctive whale`s fluke smokestack, is the largest ship ever built expressly for cruising.
For Carnival, the superliner is the fifth and most lavish member of a fleet of Fun Ships. These newest fun-tons are a milestone in the cruise line`s extraordinary growth over the last 12 years. Working mainly in the profitable waters of the Caribbean, Fun Ships have carried Carnival to the head of the $4 billion cruising industry. In numbers of passengers carried, the company ranks first. Last year it earned gross revenues of about $300 million.
It would seem there`s no such thing as too much fun where cruising is concerned. The business has become the fastest growing segment of the travel industry. Major lines have built or refitted 19 ships in the last 5 years. By the decade`s end, the number of passengers is expected to top 2 million.
The Holiday is the first of three superliners Carnival has on order. The Jubilee and its sister, the Celebration, are expected to be launched in the next 2 years, completing a $500 million investment that will more than double Carnival`s passenger capacity. The new construction attests to the company`s success since chairman Ted Arison, an Israeli-born multimillionaire shipping magnate, purchased the first Fun Ship, the Mardi Gras, in 1972.
Arison might have wondered if he had made the right move: The Mardi Gras ran aground off Miami on its maiden voyage. But there has been little to spoil the fun since.
”This is the culmination of three years of dreams, hard work and anxiety,” said Arison at a black-tie dinner in Aalbord, Denmark`s fourth largest city, where the Holiday and a previous ship, the Tropicale, were built at the Aalborg Vaerft Shipyard.
”I`m so proud of this ship I don`t know how to keep my mouth shut,”
exclaimed Meshulam Zonis, senior vice president for operations. ”We are all like little children with a new toy.”
Guests from several countries toured the new liner, and over one smorgasbord after another, met the Danes who built it. Foremost among them was the irrepressible shipyard president Haakon Jensen who got the best of most hands with his steelworker`s grip. He advised some of the Americans that if they ate enough herring they would soon be able to tell the difference between the queen of Denmark and the queen of Holland.
Aalborg sits along the Limfjord, the North Sea inlet that divides northern Jutland. Despite the long traditon of shipbuilding, the city is best known for aquavit, an elixir distilled from potatoes; undoubtedly aquavit had a lot to do with the tenor of the week-long celebration. (”Knock it back and damn the consequences,” advises one guide book.) No one drank enough, though, to essay the lyrics of ”Carry Me Back to Old Aalborg,” which were distributed at a banquet:
Carry me back, oh back to Aalborg
There`s where the `snaps` from the Danish `tatoes grow
There`s where the girls waggle sweet in the springtime.
.
.
.
Built in Aalborg, the Holiday (which began cruising the Caribbean in July) was named in Frederikshavn, a small town to the north where the ship was drydocked after ocean trials.
”May she have fair winds and calm seas and everyone aboard her happy and healthy and having fun,” said Arison`s wife, Lin, as a bottle of champagne on a cord swung toward the hull. The champagne exploded with a burst of foam and glass. A crowd of 200 delivered a round of hip-hip-hoorays; the merchant ship at the adjacent dock blasted its horn. A 20-piece shipyard orchestra struck up the ”Star Spangled Banner.”
Eschewing the ”Cary Grant crowd,” Carnival Cruise Lines has earned the reputation in some quarters as ”the K mart of the Caribbean.” Carnival was one of the first cruise lines to advertise on television. The rights alone to the Fun Ships theme song, Cole Porter`s ”Ain`t We Got Fun,” cost Carnival $55,000 this year. The lyrics were rewritten. In brochures, the company makes a point of using photographs of real passengers, not models.
”We try,” says Bob Dickinson, Carnival`s vice president of marketing,
”to hold out the idea that you`ll meet people just like you and me!”
Although that might scare off some people, it has not daunted more than 300,000 passengers, including 60,000 who returned for another go-round. The company`s success can be gauged by the high number of second-time cruisers.
A key to those beautiful totals has been the company`s effort to overcome middle-class misconceptions about cruising. Carnival has tried to remove the idle-rich connotations and to neutralize the snob appeal of the pastime by pounding home a catholic notion of fun. Fun on a Fun Ship runs the gamut from string quartet recitals to male nightgown contests to the opportunity to drive golf balls into the ocean. As always, the ship itself is the principal destination; ports of call such as St. Thomas, Nassau and St. Maarten, offer scenic backdrops.
With the Holiday, the cruise line has gone to great lengths to extend its notions of fun, while capturing some of the prestige of such ships as the QE2 and the Norway (The only two passenger ships that exceed it in size.). The challenge the company envisions for itself is running ships worthy of the luxury market without raising the low-end rates ($795 to $1,795) on which its success rests.
”The new ship is a significant break with existing tonnage in its interior design and decor,” says Dickinson.?
The interior is the work of architect and designer Joe Farcus who whipped up a pastiche of styles aiming for an atmosphere of frivolity and excitement. On a tour shortly before the ship was turned over to Carnival, the air smelled of fresh paint. Steel floors were still to be carpeted, and workers were putting the finishing touches on the Holiday.
With nine passenger decks, three swimming pools, sauna and gym, a discotheque, a casino, three lounges, a barbershop, hospital, beauty parlor and mini-shopping mall, the Holiday in many places has the authentically artificial and deeply derivative feeling of a top-of-the-line shopping mall.
Which is not to say the ship comes cheaply. The public rooms are faced with eight kinds of marble from Portugal and Italy. In many places, because the ship is complemented with an extensive sprinkler system and meets stringent fire regulations, the architects were able to use wood veneers.
The design highlight of the Holiday is the enclosed double-wide promenade deck on the starboard side. It has been tricked up to look like New York City`s Broadway in the 1930s, a tour de force of simulation, right down to the real brick street, wrought-iron lampposts, fire hydrant and what press releases proudly claim is ”an authentic New York City manhole cover.”
By the elevators, a statue of chrome, mirrors and acrylic aims for ”a Times Square type of feeling.” Messages flash on an electronic ticker tape. Times Square opens on to Broadway, and as you amble toward the stern, the avenue leads past the ship`s casino with 27 tables and 140 slot machines. Nearby, parked in the street, is the Bus Stop Cafe, a buffet line fashioned from a converted 1934 British bus. The bus` destination is Coney Island, but it is being driven by a Danish mannequin wearing a hat that says, ”We`ve got the fun.”
Continuing along Broadway circa 1930, you come to Cappuccino`s, a coffee and snack place, circa 1985. ”Broadway” has everything the real Broadway has except for pyramids of trash and a large population of mentally unstable people. The Holiday`s avenue leads past a discotheque, wired with neon, and a place called the Tahiti lounge where steel pipes have been cleverly segmented and painted to appear as big lengths of bamboo.
”Don`t blow the fantasy, it`s bamboo,” says Carnival president Micky Arison, son of the founder.
In the Blue Lagoon Lounge the turquoise fiber glass ceiling has an undulating effect so thorough that it may make drinking redundant. Toward the bow, the double-deck high Americana lounge, trimmed with eagles and glass, and equipped for theatrical productions and Las Vegas-style stage shows, seats more than 900. Not one to mince words, Micky Arison calls it ”the most dramatic room ever built on a cruise ship.” While the Holiday was moored in Denmark, the theater was one of the largest in Scandinavia.
There`s more. A deck down is Rick`s Cafe Americain, its decor borrowed from the movie ”Casablanca.” A circular piano bar has fake piano keys for air-piano renditions of ”As Time Goes By.” Back to New York for Union Square, then to the Galleria Shopping Mall. On the deck above Broadway, a bar and grill is done up as a wharf strewn with turnbuckles, anchors and mooring posts. Elevator machinery has been disguised as a 20-foot tugboat.
After all the effects on the various decks, the 24-ton spare propeller shaft at the stern comes as a relief. It`s palpably functional, placed for a real purpose, not for a spare-propeller-shaft effect.
The sort of experience the cruise ship affords can send critics of the American monoculture into apoplexy. Cruise ships, Paul Fussel notes in his book ”Abroad,” are ”small pseudo-places making endless transit between larger fixed pseudo-places.” And yet in an age of tourism, Fussel concedes that traveling by cruise ship has advantages over the airplane, at least. ”It is healthier because you can exercise on it, and it is more romantic because you can copulate on it.”
On that front, the Holiday cabins are neatly furnished and resemble small but not unpleasant motel rooms. (The ship accommodates 1,452 passengers.)
Single beds clip together. The rooms are equipped with closed-circuit TV and air-conditioning. The deluxe topmost Veranda suites have whirlpool baths, original oil paintings and lithographs by Danish artist Ole Gunderman, and a wall decor that Farcus describes as ”a gay colorful impressionistic abstract that epitomizes the Fun Ship concept.”
The Holiday was built the traditional way–from the keel up. The company`s next two ships are being built in Malmo, Sweden, by a novel method. Malmo, just a short jump by air-cushion vehicle from Copenhagen, is Sweden`s third largest city, a canal-laced port dating from the 13th Century. It was founded on herring stocks, but today it is known for the Kockums shipyard, whose giant crane (340 feet high) is the tallest thing for miles around, bestriding the dry docks like a giant croquet wicket. Kockums is assemblng the Jubilee and the Celebration from prefabricated ship sections.
The procedure was perfected building supertankers and enabled the shipyard to cut construction time in half. The ships are assembled as three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Each multiton section of plate steel is welded in a giant warehouse, painted with yellow primer and then hauled to the shipyard`s mammoth crane, which lowers the section into place. Before assembly, each block resembles a low-rise apartment building made of adobe. Although the process saves time, it is tricky because the walls, bulkheads, ducts and pipes of each block must be matched exactly.
The Jubilee, which will have an Art Deco motif, and the Celebration, whose motif will be futuristic, are similar in most respects to the Holiday, escept the new vessels will be 2 feet wider, 22 feet longer and will carry 50 more passengers. If all goes according to plan, that is.
After a tour conducted by Leif Bjork, the project manager, I asked another company employee what was a project manager`s responsibility.
”He`s the guy who will get the credit if everything goes right,” he said. ”And if everything goes wrong, he`s the guy who will be hanging from the main crane.”
