Andrea Zelinski

MIAMI -- Royal Caribbean Group's Jay Schneider had me at "microbubbles."

After arriving in town for this year's Seatrade Cruise Global conference, I stopped for a visit at Royal Caribbean Group's headquarters. That's where I found Schneider, the company's chief product innovation officer, laboring over a memo.

I wondered aloud what it means to be a chief product innovation officer. Before long, he abandoned his laptop, pulled out a key card and walked with me to show me The Cave and the warehouse.

"We like when we come up with a crazy idea," he said.

His job means developing innovations around hardware and destinations for Royal Caribbean, and group-wide digital innovations like apps and facial recognition tools to speed up embarkation.

He leads a "team of nerds," he said, himself included, who get comfortable trying something different. The idea behind his job, he said, is to tap his "brand nerdiness" and experiment to ensure that each new ship is the best one yet.

That's when he introduced me to microbubbles. These cold beads of bubbles, produced by compressors and pushed out under the hull, can reduce friction between the ship's hull and the surrounding water, boosting energy efficiency. If the bubbles are too warm, they dissipate with heat, but the ship can sail more efficiently on over cold microbubbles.

When Royal Caribbean introduced microbubbles on the Harmony of the Seas, they found the ship was 20% more efficient than its sister ship, the Allure of the Seas. Now the bubbles are deployed on the Wonder, Symphony Harmony, Odyssey, Spectrum and Ovation of the Seas.

Driven by the question of how cruises can better compete with land-based vacations, he said it was that kind of ingenuity that led to the creation of Royal Caribbean's private islands, like Perfect Day at Coco Cay in the Bahamas; it was in an attempt to build the "perfect day for a family," he said. At least one more island is in the works, he said.

We arrived at the door of The Cave. Through that door is a room where nearly every surface is a screen: three walls, the ceiling and the floor, he said. This is where the team explores onboard concepts as if they are guests walking through a ship's neighborhoods. They can look up, down and to the sides: are there any unintended consequences to putting those staterooms overlooking this corridor? How does it look and feel? What did they never notice when they were designing this space?

Schneider, who worked for The Walt Disney Company until he moved to Royal Caribbean Group in 2016, said The Cave was the kind of tool he used there, and where he first roamed worlds build for Star Wars attractions.

Then he showed me the warehouse where his team builds out replicas of their ideas, like entire stateroom mock-ups; a new idea for a bar; or interior cabin windows with more lifelike imitation views of the sea.

Not all of their ideas pan out, he said, alluding to the interior windows with imitation sea views or a new bar concept.

But having the space to build mockups and explore in The Cave helps the line continue to innovate during the pandemic, when they couldn't evaluate designs in person in shipyards halfway across the globe.

"In the pandemic, it was the only way to pull that off," he said.

While some ideas didn't pan out, others did. Upon hearing that teens and pre-teens wanted their own space to make friends, the team wondered whether there could be a secret door to get into such a space. So, they considered an arcade, where one video game would unlock to open a door to the next room when someone wins the game. They built a replica, tested it out and created three ways to trigger the door.

That secret door now exists on the Oasis of the Seas, although the original sits in the warehouse, like an exhibit in a museum of "crazy ideas."

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Dreaming up life-sized innovations in Royal Caribbean's headquarters - Travel Weekly