Clutter pollutes our daily lives. Sorting through the pile of junk mail, credit card solicitations and bills is a daily pain point. Add in the consistent stack of papers our kids bring home from school and our kitchen table can look like an episode of "Hoarders."
Then there's the time-sucking clutter. The navigating of a suffocating phone tree just to get a balance on a phone bill and the waiting on hold endlessly just to talk to a human. The waiting in line at the post office or the grocery store. The road rage that builds up from waiting in traffic.
We go on vacation to escape the clutter, but whether on a cruise or at a resort, we're often bombarded with clutter just to tell us how to vacation.
Technology can often feel like it adds to that clutter, as we download app after app on our smartphones. But what if that same technology could actually eliminate the clutter?
That's the biggest thing that hit me as I toured the preview of Carnival Corporation's new Ocean Medallion technology in December at the company's Experience Center in Miami.
The first room that Carnival's chief innovation officer John Padgett ushered us into was a room filled with every piece of paper a cruiser typically receives during a cruise.
From daily planners to shore excursions to kids club schedules to on and off-ship shopping deals, every centimeter of the room's walls were plastered with paper.
"It's our job, our responsibility to our guest, to make this go away," Padgett said.
That's what I find so fascinating about the Ocean Medallion technology that Padgett and his team have introduced. They have painstakingly analyzed every moment of a vacation and said to themselves, "How do we make this simpler?"
More importantly, how do we eliminate the time sucks of everyday life during the vacation experience?
To do that, they have utilized an array of existing technologies and combined that with some cutting-edge emerging technology to create a new experience for the cruiser.
The stop-and-wait part of the vacation has been eliminated. With the Medallion, your information is read as you approach a portal, a kiosk or a crewmember aboard the ship. You want to buy that t-shirt in the gift shop? No need to stand in line. Just scan the item's UPC bar code on your smartphone app and you're good to go. You can even have the item delivered to your stateroom-all done through a couple of swipes on your Ocean Compass app.
Anyone who has waited in line at a cruise terminal knows that embarkation can often be a pain. That's gone with the Medallion. No more special VIP lines. This technology makes everyone feel like a VIP as a base experience.
Now, to be fair, this will call for some advance work from the cruiser. The more information you plug into your Compass app before or during cruising, the more personalized your experience onboard becomes.
The level of detail we witnessed in Miami was stunning. Each stateroom is wired with a number of sensors, including body heat sensors. So, crew members will be able to do scans to tell who hasn't left their room for the obligatory first-day safety briefing. Your personal steward will be able to tell if someone is in the lavatory before they awkwardly enter a room.
Some of this technology sounds creepy for sure. To the more skeptical, it feels downright intrusive. It really comes down to how comfortable you are using technology in your everyday lives to simplify tasks. If you use Google Maps, Uber, Yelp, any online food delivery app, this will be no different.
If you've given your personal information to get an ATM card or to use Apple Pay or Samsung Pay, it's no different. In fact, Carnival officials believe they've created an even more secure encryption process than any on the market, so your information and your identity is protected more securely than ever. The little bits of data used to transmit personal information are not passed around to crewmembers. Any time your personal preferences are transmitted, that data is immediately deleted after transmission.
Anyone who has ever watched "Black Mirror"-or, going deeper in the archive, seen "Minority Report" or "Enemy of the "State"-know how technology can be used for evil. The end goal of this heavy financial investment is to provide a better customer experience. While the cruise industry has been thriving as of late, the stats of how many of us have never been on a cruise are staggering.
Carnival is trying to create a new bar for service and guest experience to motivate the 90-plus percent of the population that has found cruising to be too expensive or too complicated. That wall of clutter I saw certainly backs up the complicated part.
Padgett and fellow project architect Michael Jungen saw close-up in their time with Disney just how the mouse ears people have cornered the market on guest experience and connecting with our sense of fantasy, imagination and endless possibilities. They are trying to bring that feeling to cruising in creating a guest experience that is so flawless and so personal that the word spreads quickly and suddenly, all of those barriers to folks taking their first cruise go away.
Moreover, people realize that they can now have a luxury vacation at a middle-class price with the help of seamless technological integration. In a time where every amenity seems to have a fee attached to it, the Medallion initiative is striving to create that value and that sense that we can have that vacation of a lifetime without draining our life savings.
How do they pull this off? In a matter of a 12-day drydock in Palermo, the Royal Princess was ripped apart to support the infrastructure that none of us will notice once onboard. Behind the scenes, there are 72 miles of cable throughout the ship, 7,000 sensors, 650 readers and more than 4,000 interactive portals.
When I first saw this tech in Miami, I found it difficult to explain to my colleagues. I'm a tech geek to begin with, but the level of innovation and basic knowledge of what the guest needs that is so often missing was achieved in such detail here.
Yes, we've seen elements of this in play with Royal Caribbean and other cruise lines. Keyless room entry is becoming more the standard in the hotel industry, but I have never seen this ambitious an effort to identify and exceed guest expectations as what Carnival is attempting to pull off.
I can't wait to see the technology go from beta to fully functional aboard the Regal Princess in November.
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