Metamorphosis - Cruise Ship Portal

Insight > Shipbuilding, maintenance & repair
a simulation programme that encourages
us to take lessons from existing
passenger behaviour and apply it to the
Epic. We believe we’ve done a good job,
but only time will tell. That’s the thing
with prototypes: you never know until
you see them in operation.”
But all the planning in the world will
not guide passenger behaviour alone. The
success of a project on this scale, initially
at least, will rest with the quality of crew
on board. The Epic will boast 1,730 crew
members in total, a recruitment challenge
Martinoli and his team began tackling
more than a year ago.
62
A penthouse suite.
The 153,000t Epic will
accommodate 4,200 guests.
“The priority has always been to
ensure that the vast majority of people
joining the crew are already fully
trained and up to speed,” he reveals.
“This has required a lot of work well
ahead of time. We’ve gone through our
fleet schedule, having people
overlapping across our ships
and balancing the process
so that the percentage of
newcomers is spread evenly
across all our ships and the
balance on each is the right
mix of experienced crew and
first-timers.”
World Cruise Industry Review | www.worldcruiseindustryreview.com
Experience cocktail
Finding the right cocktail of experience and
new talent is an ambition not confined to
frontline service. Martinoli cites the variety
found in the executive echelons at NCL as
a key driver of its success and it is
something he has tapped regularly
throughout the construction process.
“When you look at the people running
the company today it’s a good mix of
those who’ve spent a lot of time in the
industry and others that have been
brought in from the outside,” he says.
“That’s very beneficial and the
opportunities for learning from one
another are immense. With the Epic it’s
not only a question of applying the
lessons we’ve learnt before; new
approaches also need to be adopted in
order to meet what for us is a new
challenge. Direct experience, external
help and new eyes are all required to
make a project of this scale work.”
A concerted effort has also been made
to involve people from across all levels of
The ship will offer a variety of performances.