Disney Cruise Line
Themed Entertainment Schedule
Project overview
Designed, planned and implemented a month long celebration of events and entertainment focused on crew members to ensure their value was appreciated during the busiest time onboard.
Timelines
3 months (including planning, scheduling, implementation and review).
Role
Entertainment manager - responsible for design and delivery of event programme.
Team
Myself, trainee Entertainment Manager, multiple other operational departments.
About Disney Cruise Line
Disney Cruise Line currently operates multiple ships and land operations to provide guests with a magical vacation on the high seas.
Alongside bringing a Disney standard of entertainment quality and experience to the cruise industry, Disney Cruise Line pioneered the rotational dining concept, by which guests rotate with their waiting staff through three different main dining rooms.
The cruise line has experienced great growth over the past several years in terms of expansion and market share. In 2011, the company held a 1.95 percent market share and by 2021, the market share was 2.2 percent by passenger and 2.7 percent by revenue.
Problem areas
Crew feel disconnected from their roles on board due to being away from their family and loved ones during the holidays.
Crew feel an decreased level of recognition for their efforts creating memorable guest experiences during December, which is one of the busiest times on board when demand is high in each department.
Conducting research
Before starting, I needed to understand what events were working from previous years and what crew thought could be added.
Crew conversations
What has worked well?
- Multi-departmental parties – to help crew meet new people.
- Big prize bingo – with the opportunity to win high-value prizes such as Apple products.
- Crew Sale – opportunity for crew members to shop in the merchandise stores after hours.
What didn’t work well?
- Event timings – some crew were unable to attend due to clashes with work schedules
- Multiple food-based events – this adds pressure to the food teams when demand is already high.
- Payment of activities – with the nature of shipboard contracts, payments were sometimes missed leaving an accounting inbalance.
What have the crew requested?
- Decorate the ship – popular on other ships, this is an opportunity to compete for best decorated section of the crew areas.
- Relaxed events – with a busy season in many roles, the crew wanted events which enabled them to unwind in a social setting.
- Beverage tastings – events like champagne, beer and wine tastings have been trailed before with great success.
Crew profiles
Certain areas of the ship were only available to certain crew members. These needed to be taken into consideration when planning the schedule. These profiles also outline the different working patterns to take into account and what type of events were requested.
Fleet activities
Collaborating with other Entertainment Managers across the ships, I wanted to understand what was being offered for the holiday (Christmas/New Year) season.
This would help with the following;
- Alignment – Ensuring crew members did not receive a better/worse experience due to the ship they were currently working on.
- Financial savings – Buying items in bulk for the entire fleet would save costs and keep budgets under control.
- Speed of delivery – Allowing different Entertainment Managers to work on various elements of the programme eased time pressures of creating an entire programme and allowed for better collaboration.
Managing stakeholders
Due to the crew entertainment department being limited with people resource, there was a need to gain operational input from other departments to run the schedule.
For this, I needed to understand all onboard department programmes planned for the December holiday season. Reviewing these allowed me to see what extra resources they could dedicate to the crew entertainment schedule.
This involved conversations with multiple department heads and external stakeholders ahead of time to keep the project on their radar and understand any constraints I needed to work around.
This project would also require detailed planning and communication during the schedule to keep everyone informed of progress and outcomes.
Defining the design area
How might we enable crew to attend more events that are of interest to them?
How might we include a mixed energy of events (both high and low) to appeal to a wide crowd?
How might we prioritise food at events to not over stretch the catering department?
How might we keep on top of crew payments for events so that non are missed?
How might we enhance the offerings for the holiday season compared to other times in the year?
Measuring success
Understand what success looked like for the project was vital to its success to help show the return on investment for Patagonia.
Attendance numbers
Event numbers showed to myself and upper management and shoreside what was popular and could attract additional future investment.
Observations
Talking to the crew at events gave me a good understanding of their feelings to the schedule. This information could be shared around the fleet and to upper management.
Budget allocation
Reviewing expenditure before, during and after events helped to show where value was added and where savings could be made in the future.
Considerations
Stakeholders were needed to be aware of the following factors that were outside of the project control but could negatively effect the project outcome.
Time schedules
Each department had different schedules where crew needed to work and these had to be taken into consideration when planning events.
Guest venue availability
Each venue on board has multiple activities happening per day, so I needed to plan carefully when I could use these for crew activities as to not impact the guest operation.
Budget
Other entertainment managers had access to the budget across the year during vacation cover, so I needed to understand any pending transactions on this before allocating funds to events.
Ideation and testing
Opportunity to think about possible solutions taking user and business needs into consideration. Talking with stakeholders and peers was crucial here to make sure nothing is missed.
Get people talking
As part of the promotion onboard, I had access to a printed layout called the ‘Crew Navigator’ which outlined all of the important information crew needed to know about working on board including safety drills, mess hours, bar opening/closing times. This was to compliment the guest version and had to uphold the high graphic guidelines Disney puts in place.
This holiday schedule had multiple events happening at the same time. For this reason, I needed to maximise the space which was used here. I tried using a 4×4 grid to advertise events and to capture the crew’s attention.
Alongside this, I designed a full tabloid (A3) sized calendar that crew could put up in their cabins to have an overview of the full month.
Trailing an idea
The idea of decorating the I95 (the main corridor on the ship) was new to the Disney Fantasy. However, this event worked very successfully on other ships.
This was an idea which was raised by multiple crew members to include in the line-up. For that reason, I wanted to try my best to include it and make it successful.
I talked to several departments and other entertainment managers to see the best way to do this. From their response, I dedicated a section of the corridor to each department as a competition to see who decorated it best.
The picture here is from the deck department who utilised lots of material offcuts from their work to create this tree. It had lighting to give it additional effects and went on to win the competition after being judged by the steering committee onboard.
Further feedback
I tested the final programme line-up with a small focus group onboard made up of people from various departments. The purpose of this was to give me a view of what could work before the event went live and also to increase interest to attract a bigger audience.
A high majority of the events had a good response and people responded to the updated/new events in the line-up with excitement.
A couple of the events needed to be adjusted before the calendar was delivered to crew cabins. This was mainly due to timings as they didn’t align well with the work schedules that I had originally been given.
Installation and delivery
These are some of the images from the various events that were part of the holiday entertainment lineup. The crew had a fantastic experience and there were lots of laughs and smiles.
Project reflections
Time to reflect and understand what went well and what could be done better.
Shifting work schedules
As a cruise ship is a 24 hour operation, sometimes the needs of the ship could change at a moment’s notice. This is something that needs to be taken into consideration (as much as possible) when planning events.
There were a couple of events where attendance was low due to this issue. It would have been beneficial to be informed about this change as soon as possible to rearrange the activity for an alternative time.
More carefully monitored budgets
The way Disney Cruise Line budgets operate makes it harder to plan for the end of the year due to management crossover.
A better system for monitoring budgets is needed from both shoreside and onboard operations.
The holiday schedule is the biggest event on the calendar and I felt as though I was stretched at times due to the budget I had, which was different across the fleet.