The Future of Passenger Ships Looks BIG

What will tomorrow’s cruise ships be like?

For starters, they will either be very large or very small, says Stephanie Gallagher, vice president of World City Corp., a New York City-based cruise line still in development.

“There are plenty of very small ships already, so the area for innovation is in the very large,” she says.

“Ships are going to get bigger, that’s inevitable,” says Kai Levandar, head of research and design at Finland’s Masa-Yards.

Levandar’s own design group has, for more than a decade, been promoting various 10-story resort hotels set atop twin hulls that are like self-contained resort islands in themselves.

But he could be speaking of Gallagher’s proposed Phoenix World City project as well. That nearly quarter-mile-long ship will have a capacity of 5,600 passengers in its 250,000 tons, with three high-rise hotels, 16 restaurants, 25 shops, courtyards, swimming pools and 100,000 square feet of meeting and educational space.

Joe Farcus, designer of the splashy new Carnival Cruise Lines ships, envisions shipboard life as “like a movie . . . but in this movie the audience is not watching, but is on the screen.”

*

Early last year, Carnival announced the construction of a 95,000-ton vessel--the largest passenger cruise ship built so far--which will cost more than $400 million and carry nearly 3,000 passengers. Due in late 1996, the still-unnamed ship is jocularly referred to by Carnival executives as “Big Bertha.”

(The biggest ship currently in service is Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norway--76,049 gross registered tons, 1,035 feet long and capable of carrying 2,032 passengers.)

Leading cruise ship architect and designer Bjorn Storbraaten of Norway, whose firm (with partner Pette Yran) has virtually invented the modern luxury suite-cabins aboard Sea Goddess, Seabourn, the Royal Viking Queen and Song of Flower, doesn’t see a big change in ship design coming up any time soon.

Storbraaten thinks that cruise lines should focus on creating more dining options, bigger health spas and creative uses of show lounge and deck areas.

He envisions show lounges of the future to be “like palladiums, multipurpose areas where you could have an ice rink or an arena circus layout, or move the seats around to create different moods and different types of theater.”

Storbraaten’s most recent design, the 296-passenger Silver Cloud (due to debut this month), is the first of four ultra-luxurious ships for a new line called Silversea.

Another company, Windstar Cruises, has already debuted two of its futuristic designs. Windstar’s three 150-passenger ships, with their computer-operated sails, came out of a design concept called Windcruiser, and were launched in December, 1986.

Subsequently, a very similar design was used for the 386-passenger Club Med 1 and Club Med 2. On each of the five ships, the remote-control sails and booms can be operated from the bridge by one person.

The dramatic twin-hulled Radisson Diamond utilizes a design principle called SWATH (small waterplane area twin hull). The 26-foot-draft twin hulls allow propulsion machinery to sit below the water line, providing considerably less engine and propeller noise and vibration, while stabilizer fins on the back and front of each hull reduce pitching and rolling.

The boat’s wider-than-average beam means companionways are more spacious, and cabins and public areas roomier than in a traditional vessel of similar length. The twin-hull, 354-passenger vessel debuted in spring, 1992.

*

But the potential headliner, the gigantic Phoenix World City, is still very much alive, despite numerous predictions of its demise. This billion-dollar project has been seven years in development so far.

Three ships are planned, one based on the East Coast, one on the West Coast and another in Hawaii.

World City’s Gallagher thinks the proposed Phoenix, with its wide variety of restaurants, shops, meeting space, classrooms and workshops--”set up not for transportation but for an experience”--typifies the future of cruising. She estimates a maiden voyage as early as Christmas, 1997.

“We’re not a theme park, we’re a small town,” she says. “We think (our ship) is a first step toward an inevitable use of our ocean. Remember, the ocean is real estate, and in the future there are going to be large platforms (similar to oil-drilling platforms) in use that could be built here in the United States . . . (to) hold hotels, resorts, universities, hospitals, prisons, senior citizen housing, parking structures--all of it real estate that can be moved in case of impending natural disaster or bad weather.”

Meanwhile, Los Angeles-based Princess Cruises is constructing the 1,950-passenger Sun Princess, a 77,000-ton vessel that is due for delivery in late 1995.

Princess promises that 70% of the outside cabins will have private verandas, and that passengers can expect a wider variety of entertainment and dining areas on board than on the line’s previous mega-ships.

Still to come are other designs that range from a trimaran (three-hull) base to a proa (outrigger) concept with pontoons that could make one-day sailings following the sun, so passengers could spend all day on the outdoor decks.