Sea ViewsFrom President and CEO, Adam Goldstein

Captain Bill promised Lisa smooth sailing. Instead she has already qualified for her mariner’s license. She’s come a long way in a short time from Sales. One of our readers asked how many languages we speak. In my case, three: English, French and Philadelphia sports. Captain Bill is amazingly bilingual in English and Norwegian. Not only that but in his younger days he could run 400m in under 50! Really, how much talent should one person have? Back to Lisa:

Lisa Bauer - Senior VP, Hotel Operations

Well the good news is we are heading further South and the weather isn’t horrific anymore, it’s only terrible. I never thought I would be happy to be in 20-25 foot seas, but its much better than the last few days at 40+ feet waves.

Regardless of the weather, the show goes on. Over the next few days, we are putting all 2,200 crew through a new GOLD training class. We are doing 15 different classes and they are being moderated by John McGirl, our VP of Human Resources. We are focusing on our GOLD service delivery, and how to have each crew member deliver the WOW in the various neighborhoods. Several of us have “volunteered” to be facilitators. We have seven facilitators in each session, and each group is assigned a neighborhood to discuss. It has been great to see the various crew members report out on what the neighborhood has to offer and how they will make our guests feel very welcomed. My phone is ringing right now, so I guess I am going to be “volunteering” again today for a few more sessions. John is very persuasive.

Other highlights from today are that Giovanni’s opened for lunch for the first time. We actually have a manager in F & B named Giovanni Guido, and he was there welcoming all of us to “his” restaurant. I would highly recommend the lasagna from Giovanni’s for lunch. I would skip the salad though – too much food, so go right for the good stuff.

Speaking of good stuff, we had a surprise birthday party last night for Chef Seidy. Seidy has been doing our start ups for years, and was in charge of our owner supply items for all of F & B. She had a multi-million dollar budget and was responsible for working with supply chain to ensure all of our items we had to supply to the ship were correctly specked, and then ordered. This included everything from glasses, to chinaware, silverware, uniforms, menus, podiums, etc. When the materials arrived in Turku, they were staged in a giant tent, where Seidy checked them, and then sent them to their home on the ship. She called it her tent, and she said she actually misses her tent now. So the pastry chef made her a huge cake yesterday in the shape of a big white tent like she had at the yard in Turku. She was very happy, and so were all of us because the cake was excellent.