NavisSpace – Improving the future cruise experience
Our readers are invited to give their input to a Finnish R & D project on how to improve the cruise experience in the future. Below is a letter that explains the goals of the work and at the bottom of it there is a link to a website where you may give your views. Thank you for your contribution!
The mission of the NavisSpace project is to make a positive contribution to the future cruise experience. This is done by creating new solutions in specific areas, providing new research on cruise vacation sustainability and trying to put the gathered knowledge into work in cruise ship design. The partners of the project are two universities with long traditions in shipping research, Åbo Akademi and Aalto, and a handful of companies serving the cruise industry; the shipyard Meyer, the elevator company Kone, the marine catering supplier Seaking and the Kudos architects specializing in interior design of cruise ships. PBI Research Institute is coordinating the project which will go on until the Summer of 2024.
Our main focus is on finding solutions improving the cruise experience in the fields where the partners in the project have potential to develop value enhancing solutions. These spheres are the public spaces of the ship, the restaurant service as well as the people and goods flow. We will read literature, interview industry participants and crew along searching clues from social media sources, to get a grasp how to add value in our chosen fields. An important source of information will be a survey (link below) that we hope will generate answers from cruise passengers or persons thinking about going on a cruise in the future. With the information gathered, combined with the expertise of our partners, we think that we can create solutions valued by customers and crew and which, in the end, also will benefit the cruise liners.
Sustainability is one thing which can not be discarded when thinking about the world today. Cruise tourism may have sustainability issues, and if these are too severe, they may affect the cruise experience for conscious travelers. Cruise ships are in several sources pointed out to be unsustainable. This conclusion is easily drawn if measures such as emissions per passenger kilometer or mile is used and then compared, for example, to flying. We think this is the wrong comparison, cruising is not so much about moving from one place to another but a destination in itself. Therefore, one task in our project is to investigate how a cruise vacation compares in terms of sustainability issues to other forms of vacations.
Our ultimate goal in NavisSpace is to get the information collected and the developed solutions to be put in to use in ship building. Being a very complex and big endeavor involving high risks, ship building for sure has a long history. How can new ideas and better solutions be incorporated at the early concept and design phases of a new ship is challenge. We will try to alter the process so that it is easier to get the best solutions adopted. This is not an easy task and requires self-interest to be put on hold and trust to be built, but if we are able to create collaborative contracting and incentive structures, there can be much to gain -and not only a better and more sustainable ship but a cheaper one too.
You can be part on this journey by answering the survey on the following link:
https://pbiresearch.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6M4sTPAGGfP7KJ0