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Sea ViewsFrom President and CEO, Adam Goldstein

Global Development and More at Royal Caribbean International’s Fleet Operations Leadership Conference

This week is the Royal Caribbean International Fleet Operations Leadership Conference in Orlando. We have many of our Captains and Hotel Directors and some of our Chief Engineers and HR Managers there plus our shoreside leaders and guests from authors to travel agent producers to our onboard retail partners. Richard Fain and I kicked off the conference with a lively Q&A session. What a pleasure it is to be around this group of people. The longevity of some of the Captains is remarkable – several were reminiscing about being on Song of Norway in 1971. The focus of the conference is on the functioning of the shipboard Executive Committees because the success of a ship is a direct reflection of the success of the EC.

There are lots of things to discuss with this group and of course one of them is our continued global development. Among other things we will have 10 of our 22 ships in Europe in the summer of 2011. Just a few years ago we would not have imagined such a scenario. Over the next 90 days we will be releasing all of our itineraries from spring 2011 to spring 2012 for sale.

Almost any crisis in the world affects us. We are saddened by the destruction and casualties in Chile. While we don’t have as much involvement there as we do in Haiti, our sister line Celebrity Cruises operates out of Valparaiso, we are represented in Chile for sales and marketing by Interexpress and we had well over 100 crew there on vacation. While we are not aware of any of our own people who were killed or injured in the earthquake, there are some friends and family who lost their lives. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all Chileans.

On a much more positive note we have now accounted for all of our Haitian crew who were on vacation at the time of the earthquake there. Just after January 12th it seemed like we might not be able to account for dozens of employees. After weeks of little progress we have now made contact with everyone. We are very pleased about this but always mindful that many, many others were not so fortunate.

A Letter from Sam Davis (Burn Advocates Network) Regarding Royal Caribbean’s Relief Efforts in Haiti

While my blog lately has covered topics other than Haiti, the country and its people has not been far from my thoughts. We continue to transport pallets of supplies on each and every ship that calls on Labadee. The outpouring of support from the community has been unbelievable, with pallets and pallets of needed supplies coming into our warehouse every day from all over the country.

Below is a letter I received from Sam Davis, founding director of the Burn Advocates Network, whose organization is providing much needed medical attention to Haitians hurt and injured during the earthquake. We are thankful that we can continue to assist organizations, such as the Burn Advocates Network, that make a difference in lives of the Haitian people.

Dear Mr. Goldstein:

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your company’s generosity. I was blessed to travel to Haiti aboard your Explorer of the Seas cruise ship last week. There, at their Labadee dock, your staff and I oversaw the offloading of over 65 pallets of medical supplies and emergency food. In addition, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines donated 200 mattresses, bedding, and hundreds of pounds of clothes donated by the crew for this relief effort. With the precise teamwork of the Explorer’s ship and ground crews, the entire shipment of 65 pallets was unloaded onto the piers, providing 60,000 pounds of aid. After a one-hour convoy, we reached our destination in Cap Haitien, Haiti, where not a single package was damaged, delayed, or diverted. In other words…

“From Dock to Doctor” in 6 days!

Many of these supplies went to For Haiti With Love, a 24-hour FREE emergency clinic specializing in burn care. In the last few weeks, they have treated thousands of earthquake victims. While in Haiti, I also formed a relationship with the Justinian Hospital run by the government of Haiti. There Dr. Andre Voltain, Chief of Medicine, and Dr. Jean-Gracia Coq, Chief of Surgery, informed me that they lacked an oxygen generator and had only one x-ray machine, a beat up C Arm, which had been down for several weeks, scarcely the equipment expected at a hospital of three hundred plus patients. During my short stay, two gravely burned Haitian children had to be airlifted to Shriners Hospital in Boston because the equipment to save them did not exist.

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Helping Haiti Move Forward

Haiti is several weeks post-earthquake. Royal Caribbean’s involvement is what one would expect from our company and people. The media has moved on to other topics or at least other aspects of the post-earthquake environment. Meanwhile, our people and guests continue to help. This will remain true for a very long time given Haiti’s needs.

I would like to thank the remarkable number of people who wrote letters, sent emails and posted on blogs in support of the calls of our ships and the importance of delivering supplies, maintaining economic activity and sustaining hope. Some of the most heartfelt communications came from our own employees including at headquarters.

Fortunately the number of employees who have not made contact with us has significantly reduced. For days it was stuck at 34 out of 50 and it seemed that we were facing a possible 68% death rate of our crew who were at home in Haiti on vacation. Now the number is down to 11 and none of those are confirmed dead. So we continue to hope that all of our crew are in fact safe but we simply do not know. Nine of the 11 have addresses in the Dominican Republic so we’re hoping some of the 11 were not even in Haiti at the time. Obviously we are trying to contact them to be sure.

The ships are routinely bringing in pallets of supplies and within a week we will have delivered over 1,000 pallets. There is a focus right now on getting three generators onboard to be delivered to schools in Haiti. Also by a week from now we will have contributed over $500,000 in proceeds from the revenue we normally earn during our Labadee calls. In addition, in aggregate our shoreside employees, guests and crew have donated $300,000 to relief efforts.

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Guest Post: On the Ground in Haiti

There are a lot of reasons why it is a good thing John Weis is in Haiti. Most of them have to do with helping the recovery effort and partnering with Messrs. Clinton and Farmer. But another reason is helping me with this blog as the earnings call last week and the Board meeting next week have put me squarely behind the eight ball. Anyway, there really isn’t anything I can say that matches John’s eyewitness account from Port-au-Prince.

This is day two in Haiti and from what I am told things are getting better slowly but surely. When I arrived I was expecting to see the worst but the first thing I saw was two C-17′s landing from the US unloading pallet after pallet of supplies. There were other nations at the airport as well including Brazil, U.K., Israel, France and Canada all with troops on the ground and ready to assist in any way they could. What was amazing is that as fast as they unloaded, it was being taken out of the airport compound to those who needed it. There were huge encampments of relief workers only dwarfed by the camps set up by the people of Haiti that had lost their homes.

The other thing that struck me was the sheer number of people on the ground helping in the relief effort. Not just military, but ordinary citizens who dropped what they were doing and came down here to help, some on their own dime and some associated with organizations or governments. Three of the people I spoke with had jobs and families that they simply put on hold and came down to Haiti to help people they didn’t even know.

While I thought I was prepared to see the destruction as a result of the pictures you see on the news, being here and seeing it is another story. The destruction in the downtown area was complete and very focused in the area of the government buildings and the immediate surrounding areas, although there is no place you can go where there isn’t some level of destruction by the earthquake.

Destruction to a building in Haiti

The pictures fail to capture the magnitude of the destruction and the raw power it took to destroy some of these buildings that had walls 3 feet thick. Many people are living on the streets right in front of their homes because they are afraid to go back inside. Other homes, while still standing have huge structural cracks making them unsafe. Others have had their homes completely destroyed and you see them trying to salvage what they can from their homes taking what they can from their lives before the quake.

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Guest Post: Water and Supplies Continue to be Distributed in Haiti

Each day a new set of opportunities, setbacks, advances and delays unfolds in and outside Haiti. The UN is obviously a major player in the relief and recovery effort. As previously noted we have worked closely with them especially in connection with President Clinton, Special UN Envoy to Haiti, and his Deputy Special Envoy Dr. Paul Farmer.

They have an absolutely enormous job on their hands and while all of our efforts are helpful to them, we have decided to provide more direct and immediate assistance in a form I believe will be exceptionally productive. We have agreed to second John Weis, our Associate VP, Private Destinations, to Paul Farmer for three months. John did a phenomenal job getting Labadee ready for Oasis of the Seas prior to the earthquake, and since the earthquake he has done a exceptional job of mobilizing our relief effort. While we will certainly feel John’s absence, we are proud to contribute him in this fashion. I have asked him to comment on this new twist in his relationship with Haiti:

I want to convey my thanks to Royal Caribbean, Adam and Craig Milan for giving me the opportunity to take on this challenge. My wife Stacy also supports this so I want to thank her as well. Over the past 3 three years, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of work in Haiti, so I have made many friends there and have grown to appreciate the friendliness of the people, their ingenuity and their endurance. So in short, I have a huge amount of gratitude for the team supporting this relief effort and the opportunity to work on something I have a great passion for.

My first and immediate task is to look at the logistics framework from a long-term perspective and establish a storage and distribution depot here in South Florida. I will share more details on this in the weeks to come.

The relief and rebuilding effort will be monumental and it is going to be completed one step at a time. Looking at everything that needs to be done to rebuild an entire city that has been destroyed can be daunting. People on the ground, like Maryse Kedar, and people back here, like Richard Pruitt, who is coordinating the relief effort on the Royal Caribbean side, will make sure this becomes a reality. I wanted to share with you some of Maryse and her team of eight’s efforts – which includes two crew members that went to her for help and are now playing a big role in the water distribution.

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Navigator of the Seas to Bring Relief Supplies to Haiti

Royal Caribbean International continues to provide supplies and other assistance towards the Haitian relief effort. By the end of this week, 120 palettes of supplies including water, rice and powdered milk will have been delivered for distribution by Food for the Poor. Below are photos of Navigator of the Seas being loaded with supplies heading to Haiti.

Palettes of water destined for Haiti waiting to be loaded onto Navigator of the Seas

Interested in helping? Royal Caribbean International is working with Food For The Poor and the Pan American Development Foundation. We encourage guests to make monetary donations to either of these organizations which are currently engaged in the relief effort. For even more information on Royal Caribbean’s humanitarian relief to Haiti, click HERE.

Perspectives on the Situation in Haiti

The extraordinary situation in Haiti continues and will go on in various ways for years. While this blog is a vehicle for communicating some of the aspects of what Royal Caribbean is thinking and doing, there is no way for a person or a company to truly comprehend the vastness of the tragedy or the needs of the Haitian people. So all we can really do here is give various perspectives on the situation. There are two in particular I want to bring to your attention at the moment.

The first goes by the strange name of sitrep and encompasses the many dimensions of activity occurring in and around Royal Caribbean for the purpose of managing and assisting with this crisis. The sitrep is both a process and a document that occurs every day usually early in the morning. It brings together many, many departments who have an interest and/or an influence on the situation. I only intend to post the sitrep report once but you can assume a version is coming out every day for the foreseeable future. I am grateful to all the sitrep participants, under the aegis of Gary Bald, Senior VP of Safety Security, & Environment.

View today’s sitrep report.

The second is more focused and more meaningful. In fact, it’s unbelievable. I mentioned previously that Maryse Kedar, President of SOLANO, our Haitian subsidiary, was in PAP at the time of the earthquake. By great fortune, she was ok. By Monday of this week she was well along with acquiring a water truck, accessing a supply of clean water and beginning distribution of meaningful volumes of clean water. Her report is attached. There are no words to describe how proud we are of her efforts that are at least commensurate with anything else we know of in PAP.

View today’s report from Maryse Kedar. Photos included.

Guest Post: Update on Royal Caribbean’s Relief Efforts Taking Place in Port-au-Prince

I am proud of what our people and our ships are doing and below John Weis gives some very specific examples of great contributions being made by great Royal Caribbean people and their family members

The ships going back to Labadee, including Navigator of the Seas today, are obviously making a very valuable contribution to the relief effort by offloading supplies at Labadee. The media understand this and generally have written and spoken about the relief effort in positive terms. But in the last 24 hours, sparked by an article in the Guardian in the UK, a different and more critical view has emerged that questions how our guests can justify having a good time in Labadee when there is such misery less than 100 miles away.

My view is this — it isn’t better to replace a visit to Labadee (or for that matter, to stay on the ship while it’s docked in Labadee) with a visit to another destination for a vacation. Why? Because being on the island and generating economic activity for the straw market vendors, the hair-braiders and our 230 employees helps with relief while being somewhere else does not help. These 500 people are going to need to support a much larger network of family and friends, including many who are in (or are missing in) the earthquake zone. Also, the north is going to bear a good part of the burden of the agony of the south, and the more economic support there is to the north, the better able the north will be to bear this burden. People enjoying themselves is what we do. People enjoying themselves in Labadee helps with relief. We support our guests who choose to help in this way which is consistent with our nearly 30 year history in Haiti.

To John:

The team has been working through this holiday weekend and has been in contact with several people on the ground in Port Au Prince so I wanted to focus this blog on the efforts that are taking place there. We have all come to appreciate the resilience of the Haitian people and I think its important to share with you some of the positive things that are happening on the ground that are being coordinated by regular people like you and I.

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Guest Post: Royal Caribbean’s Relief Efforts Continue in Haiti

On the ground in Labadee, the word is that many people are traveling from Port Au Prince to Cap Haitian. For those of you that don’t know, Cap Haitian is about 15 miles from Labadee on the other side of the mountain. A gymnasium there is being used as a makeshift hospital as all the other medical facilities are full and there are thousands of people coming into Cap Haitian to seek shelter, food and water or medical attention. Despite this, the conditions in Cap Haitian are relatively calm at this point and the local authorities and the UN have the situation under control.

Through the good work of David Southby, the Labadee Site Manager and many others, all the supplies that were delivered by Independence of the Seas on Friday have been distributed. We’ve also gone through the site giving up any extra lounge chairs, bedding and mattresses which are now being used in the makeshift hospital. We have also heard from our close colleague and good friend, Maryse Kedar, President of SOLANO, who is in Port Au Prince taking on a leadership role with the recovery effort in her neighborhood. Our thoughts and prayers are with her and David.

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Guest Post: Royal Caribbean’s Community Responds to the Crisis in Haiti

The world has understood with intense clarity that the earthquake in Haiti is an event of enormous magnitude requiring a global outpouring of assistance. Initial fund-raising efforts appear to be very successful. The crucial variable is the organization of the relief effort and the ability to get supplies to the people in need. The Royal Caribbean community is touched in many ways by this crisis. One of the primary impacts is on our Crown & Anchor Society members many of whom have been to Labadee and have interacted with our Haitian employees either onboard or at the site. I asked Betsy O’Rourke, our Senior VP, Marketing, to share some thoughts at this juncture and here is what she wrote:

It has been truly gratifying to hear from so many loyal to Royal Crown & Anchor members as the tragedy in Haiti has unfolded. These wonderful people have contacted us with so many well intended ideas for how to help, looking for us to facilitate the delivery of goods and services to those in desperate need. Adam’s involvement with former President Clinton on the economic development of Haiti has been instrumental in Royal Caribbean’s quick response to the crisis. Yesterday our first ship delivered much needed supplies as Independence of the Seas called on Labadee. While we are very fortunate to be able to help in this way, please remember President Clinton’s strong advice to well-intentioned individual donors – please make cash contributions to reputable charities rather than individually attempting to provide supplies.

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About Adam

Adam Goldstein, President and CEO Royal Caribbean International

Adam is a father and a Phillies fan. He's got a mean table tennis serve.

Adam Goldstein, the President and CEO of Royal Caribbean International, has been answering it Royally since 1988. In 1998, Advertising Age named Adam one of their “Marketing 100,” the magazine's annual roundup of the best and brightest American and international marketing minds.

Goldstein graduated with honors from Princeton University, majoring in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He also has a law degree from Harvard and an MBA with distinction from INSEAD, the European business school in Fontainebleau, France. Adam and his wife have two children and live in Miami, Fla.

Lisa Bauer

Executive Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing

Lisa Bauer is Executive Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing overseeing Royal Caribbean International's global Marketing and Revenue Management as well the company's Sales & Marketing Offices and International Representatives around the world, which represents three of the company's brands – Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Club Cruises. Lisa's blog posts have provided a behind the scenes look into new product developments including dining, entertainment and much more. Lisa is a huge animal lover, and has several cats and dogs, including a chocolate lab puppy named Coco Chanel and two rescue cats, Dolce & Gabbana.

John Weis

Vice President of Global Tour Operations

John Weis is currently the Vice President of Global Tour Operations for Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. In this role John oversees all aspects of the shore excursion operations worldwide for Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises & Azamara Club Cruises. John joined Royal Caribbean in 1998 and has held various management positions in Accounting/Finance, Supply Chain/Logistics, Private Destinations and most recently in Global Tour Operations. During his tenure, he was in charge of the redevelopment project at Labadee including the construction of a pier and development of one of the first public/private partnerships with the government of Haiti. He was also assigned to the Clinton Foundation assisting in the reconstruction efforts in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. In addition, John has played an active role as chair of the United Way Fund raising campaign at Royal Caribbean for two years and serves on the Audit Committee for Food For the Poor. John is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University and is a CPA. He is married and has two children.

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo

Executive Vice President of Operations, Guest Port Experience Royal Caribbean International

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo is Executive Vice President of Operations for Royal Caribbean International overseeing Hotel Operations, Marine Operations, Land Operations, Entertainment and Activities, and Food and Beverage Operations. Lisa has held a variety of roles since joining Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. in 1985 and last served as Celebrity Cruises' Senior Vice President of Hotel Operations, where she played a vital role in shaping extraordinary guest experiences for the brand and was instrumental in the delivery of the line's Solstice-Class of ships. In 2001, Travel Agent magazine named Lisa one of the "Most Powerful Women in Travel." Lisa is an avid and passionate (American) football fan and has named two of her puppies (she has 5) after her favorite team's quarterback.