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Orla O’Sullivan talks to Kevin Douglas, vice-president of
technical projects, newbuilds, for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines,
about how it may be easier to fund the building of new ships
than renovate existing ones.
Recalling how he approached work
on the Oasis of the Seas – the
world’s biggest cruise ship –
Kevin Douglas, Royal Caribbean Cruise
Lines’ (RCCL) vice-president of technical
projects, newbuilds, calmly exclaims that:
“Every big project is just a series of
smaller projects.”
As part of his work on a cruise ship five
times the size of the Titanic, and 40%
bigger than any ship at sea today, Douglas
and his team handled some of its more
novel features such as Central Park.
“
Unlike its New York namesake, the
ship’s Central Park has a tropical garden
featuring vines, banana trees and bamboo.
Does he know the number of plants used?
56
Refit
for purpose?
“12,167 plants, trees and shrubs is the
figure that comes to mind,” he says, “I
always had a good memory for numbers.
I’m great in pub quizzes.”
Douglas spent the last three months of
the two-and-a-half years it took to build
the Oasis overseeing the final elements in
Finland and in April he’ll be in a German
shipyard for the more routine task of
refurbishing a ship due its seven-to-eight
year modernisation.
While his job title reflects the focus on
newbuilds, or “revits” [revitalisations], as
Sometimes we take a project all the way from
a blank sheet, other times we come in and do
specific projects.
”
he calls them, Douglas also spends
considerable time working on special
projects, some of which are international
joint ventures.
World Cruise Industry Review | www.worldcruiseindustryreview.com
His involvement so late in the process
on the Oasis wasn’t normal, he says.
“Sometimes we take a project all the way
from a blank sheet, other times we come
in and do specific projects.”
On the Oasis, built by STX Europe, in
Turku, Finland, he says there was a need
to bring in extra hands. “There were so
many new venues and opportunities
arising too late to get the shipyard to do
it, it would have been a distraction from
building the ship,” he notes. For example,
a planned hairdressers was dropped for a
cupcake outlet. “It’s immensely popular,
but could we have predicted it would
have been popular three years ago? No.”
The Oasis was ordered in February 2006,
before the cupcake craze swept the US.
Douglas cites RCCL’s chairman Richard
Fain, who said the company’s design goal
with the Oasis was a ship that’s one-third
familiar to customers, one-third
evolutionary and one-third revolutionary.
For those working on it, that meant the
Oasis built on incremental knowledge
acquired as RCCL upgraded from earlier
classes of its ships, such as the latest
Voyager class, then the Freedom class and
now the Oasis class. “We didn’t just go to
the Oasis overnight,” he notes.