Cruise lines loosen up, let guests in secret areas

by Chris Owen on

Ever since the terrorist attack of 9/11 security has been tight on cruise ships, and rightfully so. As a great big floating hotel, ships are also great big floating targets. When it comes to security, cruise lines have an unwavering focus on protecting ships and passengers. Having made a higher level of security commonplace, cruise lines are once again opening doors that up to now have been locked tightly.

Below deck, backstage and behind “crew only” doors, the sophisticated operations of cruise ships have always been of interest to guests. Now, Royal Caribbean is granting access to those secret areas through an All Access Tour.

“The All Access Tour offers guests the opportunity to learn about what it takes on-board to deliver the world’s most contemporary vacation, also known as the Royal Advantage,” said Lisa Bauer, senior vice president of Hotel Operations, Royal Caribbean International.

Guests now have the option to visit behind-the-scenes operations spaces and meet key shipboard staff members on an escorted tour during their Royal Caribbean vacation. The All Access Tour will offer guests insight into the inner workings of some of the world’s largest cruise ships and be available fleet-wide.
“Our guests have always inquired into what happens behind the scenes and below deck” said Bauer, adding “We are glad to offer these really special guest tours into areas that are normally not accessible, escorted by staff members who explain the complex workings of running of the world’s largest and most innovative cruise ships.”

The $150 per person All Access Tour escorts guests into a variety of formerly “off limits” secret areas, including a visit to the bridge, galley, backstage of the main theater, engine control room and other behind-the-scenes operations areas that collectively create the best vacation experience and value for guests. At least one 3.5 hour All Access Tour will be offered on itineraries shorter than seven nights, and two tours offered aboard a seven-night or longer itinerary with additional tours added, based on demand.

It’s not just Royal Caribbean that is opening up areas not seen in a long time, Princess Cruises jumped in a while ago with their Bon Voyage Experience.

The program is a new twist on the departure celebration of bygone days, when friends and family would routinely come aboard to see off passengers. Because of increasingly tighter security procedures, this practice disappeared more than two decades ago, but Princess added it back last year, complete with lunch in the dining room and tour of the ship.

The Bon Voyage Experience enables passengers to extend an invitation to their guests to join them on-eboard during sailing day for a four-course dining room lunch with wine, a ship tour and a souvenir photo. Passengers and their guests get VIP priority embarkation and will be able to spend about four hours together on the ship before it sets sail. The cost for the program is $39 per person, which can be applied toward a future Princess cruise.

Princess Cruises also offers an immersive cooking experience where guests go behind the scenes for a Chef’s Table program.

Galley tours available during the quiet off-hours are one thing, the Chef’s Table experience is quite another. This program takes interested diners behind the scenes during the height of dinner preparation in a fully-functioning production kitchen where they’ll also enjoy Champagne and hors d’oeuvres, followed by a special multi-course tasting dinner paired with selected wines in the dining room.

Sister-line Carnival Cruise Lines does a Chef’s Table too. This one-of-a-kind culinary experience includes an exquisite multi-course dinner hosted by one of the line’s master chefs along with a private champagne reception and a personalized tour of the galley for $75 per person.

As cruise lines loosen up, if programming like this is cause for worry that someone would join the tour with a bomb and blow up the ship, forget it. There was an armed security guard along on the tour every step of the way.

Flickr photo by sketchyparrot

Related Stories

Vanilla Ice appears on Travel Channel’s Man v. Food Nation tonight

by Chris Owen on

On the Travel Channel’s Man v Food Nation, host Adam Richman explores the “big food” offerings of a different American city each week before facing off against a pre-existing eating challenge at a local restaurant. On tonight’s episode, Richman visits Key West and the Florida Keys and got a surprise visit from host of DIY Network’s The Vanilla Ice Project, Rob Van Winkle (aka Vanilla Ice).

In each episode of Man vs Food Nation, food challenges may involve hot and spicy, unusual, famous or large quantities of food. Richman finds places in each city to indulge his appetite and visits local landmark, interacting with local restaurateurs and giving a brief insight to the local community.

Tonight Richman heads over to Key West’s Hogfish Bar & Grill to taste a local favorite sandwich dubbed ‘The Killer Hogfish.’ To top it off, a slice of Key Lime Pie is in order so Richman heads to the Blue Heaven restaurant, thought to be the best Key Lime Pie in town.

Rapper/Home Remodeling expert Vanilla Ice, a Florida resident and host of DIY Network’s The Vanilla Ice Project, surprises Adam at Blue Heaven and explains why the Florida Keys is home to the best Key Lime Pie.

Then it’s time for the challenge and Richman heads to the Key Largo Conch House for the Conch Republic Fritter Contest: eat the most Conch fritters in 15 minutes and be crowned the king or queen of the Conch.

This episode airs tonight, July 6th at 9:00p e/p on the Travel Channel and would make great homework for anyone planning a visit to Key West any time soon.

Flickr photo by wonker

Related Stories


Meet Hawaii’s greenest farmers market

by Eva Holland on

Searching for local produce with a minimal eco-footprint? Look no further than the Hale’iwa Farmers’ Market, which claims — convincingly — to be Hawaii’s greenest.

Hale’iwa Town is located on Oahu‘s legendary North Shore, in the heart of the big-wave surf scene. Its market is open every Sunday from 9pm to 1am, and aims to be Hawaii’s first totally green, zero-waste market.When I visited, more than 40 vendors had laid out their finest fresh produce, crafts and prepared foods. Most came from the North Shore, though a few items came in from elsewhere on Oahu or neighboring islands. I cruised along the rows of stands and bought a mango and pineapple smoothie that had been blended using the market’s solar power. The smoothie and the avocado sandwich I went for next were both served to me in corn-based disposable containers — unlike their plastic cousins, my containers were biodegradable.

In the midst of the vendors I found the Zero Waste Station, where the market’s trash was sorted. Food scraps go to a local pig farmer, the disposable dishes get composted, glass and cans are recycled, and a last — hopefully unnecessary — bin takes any remaining garbage.

Hale’iwa’s market may not be on wheels, but its commitment to minimal waste puts it on the cutting edge of American farmers’ markets. If you can tear yourself away from the surf (and the surfers), it makes a great Sunday breakfast or lunch stop on Oahu’s North Shore.

Check out the gallery below for some shots from the market. Fresh produce fanatic? Gadling has more farmers’ markets recommendations for you.

%Gallery-127632%

[Disclosure: My visit to the Hale’iwa Farmers’ Market was part of a trip sponsored by the Oahu Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. Nonetheless, my opinions about the epic rightness of blending mango and pineapple together are my own.]

Big Apple Beer Gardens Making a Comeback

by David Farley on
Let us consider the beer garden. For many of us, the lasting imagine of this outdoor suds-flowing extravaganza is one of older gentlemen showing great prowess in swinging one-liter steins of beer while lederhosen-clad musicians hammer out polka tunes on accordions. Sausages are consumed. Women in dirndls patrol the aisles, six or eight mugs of beer clasped between their fingers, plopping them in front of anyone who’s swinging an empty.

This was far from the scene at the beer garden where I was imbibing late last week. There wasn’t an accordion or gray head in sight. Instead, MGMT blared from the speakers and young men (and women) in ironic t-shirts and baseball caps (one guy wearing an ’80s-era Milwaukie Brewers cap, fittingly enough), were laughing and toasting and slamming their empty pint glasses down. Here is where one might be tempted to insert a cliché phrase about this not being your vater‘s biergarten; I’ll resist. I was actually in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, hipster mecca, and home of a a few new beer gardens.

Which is rather significant when put in the context of the history of New York’s outdoor drinking spots (a history surely everyone knows, right? Right). For decades, New York City had only one beer garden. Bohemian Hall (known to most New Yorkers as “the beer garden in Astoria”) is of Czech provenance, and opened in 1911, a time when beer culture was at an acme in the United States (more on that later). In the last few years, however, there has been an overflow of beer gardens opening in New York, a welcome sign for a city that has long lacked adequate outdoor drinking venues. Big Apple beer gardens are making a comeback.

But why was this suddenly happening? How is it that in the last few years several beer gardens have been blooming in New York? Here’s the exhaustive list: the Cologne-accented Loreley, Radegast, Goods, and Berry Park all in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the Eataly-owned rooftop La Birreria, The Lot, the Standard Biergarten (the latter two bookend the new High Line Park), BeerParc (in the Eventi Hotel) and Bier International, all in Manhattan; plus there’s Studio Square in Long Island City, Queens and Mission Dolores in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

“The first reason,” says Michael Momm, who owns the Loreley beer garden on the Lower East Side and its new sibling of the same name in Williamsburg, “is the craft beer movement. When I came here 25 years ago, you could only get beers like Becks and Heineken in a bottle. There’s so much more availability and awareness and interest in beer now.”


At one time there were hundreds of beer gardens just in Queens. Brooklyn boasted almost fifty breweries. In 1873, there were 4,000 breweries in the United States. But anti-German sentiment during and after World War I and Prohibition pretty much killed off beer culture in America. As Burkhard Bilger wrote in a fascinating profile in the New Yorker of Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head brewery owner, “Beer went from barrel to bottle and from saloon to home refrigerator, and only the largest companies could afford to manufacture and distribute it.” In 1965, Bilger notes, America had one craft brewery — Anchor Steam, in San Francisco; today there are over 1500. Craft beer, experts predict, will accounts for 20 percent of the beer market in the next decade.

Raj Moorjani and Hope Tarr noticed the sudden handful of beer gardens popping up (or, rather, that there were suddenly cool outdoor places to drink they’d never heard of, like Goods in Williamsburg) and checked to see if there was an app for that. There wasn’t and BeerGardensNYC was born, a New York City beer garden locator, which launched in September 2010. They agree the craft beer movement has a lot to do with the spread of beer gardens, but also say the recent recession has played a large role. “A group of people can go hangout at a beer garden and have a good time for cheap,” says Moorjani.

Tarr, a romance novelist and travel writer, adds: “A few years ago there was a lot of attention on classic cocktails. But now you have the same attention being drawn to something else. And that is beer and beer gardens. You don’t have to go to Germany to drink a good Radesberger Pilsner anymore.”

And cheers to that. Momm takes it a step further saying it’s “capitalism in action.”

“People see what works. We’ve had people come into Loreley asking about who our food purveyors are and where we buy our furniture. This is just what happens in the restaurant business.”

What will be next? Will beer gardens continue to blossom all over New York and beyond? Momm is about ready to open a Loreley in Los Angeles.

But here’s what I think: sandwiched beween Berry Park and Lorely is the brand new Spritzenhaus, a massive Bavarian-style beer hall. I’d be willing to bet a beer or two someone has come into Spritzenhaus already asking where they got their furniture.

SkyMall Monday: Remote Control Beverage Cooler

by Mike Barish on

Summer’s here and it’s time to kick back by the pool with some ice cold drinks. The problem with spending time outside, however, is that you end up far away from your refrigerator. How is one supposed to keep himself refreshed when all of the Zima is chilling in the kitchen (assuming, of course, that said kitchen is in Japan, where Zima is still produced)? You can’t be expected to get up from your chaise lounge, walk several feet, endure the arctic blast of air conditioning once you enter your home and then retrieve a beverage that is held captive behind some heavy refrigerator door. It’s 2011, after all. Here at SkyMall Monday headquarters, our dog butlers deliver all of our drinks to us, but we understand that such service is not an option for everyone. Thankfully, SkyMall has just what you need if your domesticated animals have yet to learn how to deliver cold liquid refreshment to you. Put your feet up, stay out of the kitchen and quench any thirst with the Remote Control Beverage Cooler.For decades, we’ve been told that robots would make our lives easier in the future. Well, the future is now. From Rosie in The Jetsons to the robot in Rocky IV to Vicki on Small Wonder, robots have promised us easier and more fulfilling lives. Now, the time has come for the rise of the machines. What’s the worst that could happen?

Think that getting up to grab a beer isn’t hard work? Believe that modern conveniences are making us lazy? Well, while you try to open a bottle with your teeth, we’ll be reading the product description:

Get up and walk all the way over to the cooler for a cold one? Not necessary. Just point your remote, and get your drink delivered, no cabana boy required. This fun remote-control cooler holds up to a dozen bottles or cans plus ice, plus collapses for easy storage; make it go forward, back, turn or spin just by adding batteries.

It’s perfect for when your cabana boy is on strike (stop asking for dental insurance, Raúl!) or for when you want to spin your beer in circles to make it explode upon opening.

Of course, the best reason to purchase the Remote Control Beverage Cooler is because you’re a raging misogynist.

Check out all of the previous SkyMall Monday posts HERE.