Royal Caribbean Let Passengers Design Its Next Ship — and the Ideas Got Wild

This week, Royal Caribbean did something no cruise line has really done before: it handed the whiteboard to its passengers. Onboard the line's President's Cruise — an annual sailing where its most loyal guests travel alongside top executives — President and CEO Michael Bayley and product development chief Jay Schneider hosted a no-rules brainstorming session to dream up ideas for a future cruise ship.

The rules were simple: there were none. Guests shouted out anything that came to mind, no matter how absurd, and the design team wrote it all down. Then the team fed the ideas into an AI image generator and produced a visual of what this fantasy ship might look like — zany, over the top, and exactly as wild as you'd hope.

Let's run through the highlights, because some of these are genuinely inspired.

The crowd-pleaser was a lazy river — but not the kind you know. One version would wrap around the entire length of the ship, so you could float along with ocean views the whole way. Another guest wanted bar stops along it (naturally), and someone else pitched a vertical lazy river connecting decks, so you could float down from one level to another. Other pool ideas: a sand-bottom pool, deeper swimming pools, and a swim-up casino.

Then things escalated. One guest proposed taking two Icon-class ships and joining them into a giant catamaran, with the space between the hulls housing a restaurant or lounge and a train running below to move passengers around. Bayley did some quick math: roughly 600,000 gross tons, carrying about 17,000 passengers and 7,000 crew.

The adrenaline list was long: a full-sized roller coaster, a go-kart track wrapping the ship, bungee jumping, a drop tower, a ship-wide zip line, a teen ropes course, and an amusement park neighborhood at the stern. One kid had the best idea of all — a slide passengers could use to disembark after the cruise ends.

A lot of guests wanted a deeper connection to the ocean itself: a glass-bottom section or long underwater viewing tunnel to watch marine life, underwater robotic vehicles, and a whole underwater-themed neighborhood with a giant aquarium, ocean-themed restaurants, and a dry slide passing through the aquarium.

Other standouts: a giant rubber duck on the top deck (a nod to cruising's biggest recent fad) that executives jokingly upgraded into a rotating duck with a restaurant inside, complete with the Royal Caribbean logo and a gold chain; detachable pods that could visit ports too small for the main ship; a helicopter pad; sideways-moving elevators; a Prohibition-era speakeasy with a cigar lounge; a classic 360-degree Viking Crown Lounge; a zero-gravity room; an indoor beach neighborhood; a glass dome over the top decks for cold-weather cruising; and a hidden room left off the deck plans for daily surprise experiences. One guest — who said he loved cruising so much he'd want to be buried on the ship — pitched an onboard cemetery as a revenue opportunity. Probably not making the cut.

Here's why this matters more than it sounds. Royal Caribbean is well into designing its upcoming Discovery Class ships, and guests have recently been taking part in confidential design testing. Schneider says guest feedback is routinely folded into real ship designs — and Bayley's point that today's wild idea becomes tomorrow's signature feature has receipts. A real park in the middle of a ship sounded insane once; now Central Park is one of cruising's defining spaces. The executives even shared the story of the tethered blimp Royal Caribbean tested on the original Oasis of the Seas, which broke free during sea trials and was eventually recovered in Sweden — and kept experimenting anyway, giving us the North Star capsule.

Will any of these specific ideas make it? Most won't. But the session is a reminder of how Royal Caribbean innovates: it asks, it listens, and it has the appetite to try. If the Discovery Class is on your radar, these brainstorms are exactly why it pays to watch closely as design details emerge — and why booking early on a new ship class historically gets you the best staterooms and prices before they climb.

For now, we can dream. Vertical lazy river, anyone?

Source: Royal Caribbean Blog — read the full story here.