(upbeat music)
- I'm here on the Carnival Mardi Gras.
This will be the largest ship for the largest cruise line,
and it's, as you can see,
still very much under construction.
Cruise operator Carnival
invited me to a ship yard in Finland
to see the ship before it's even finished.
Every square meter on a cruise ship is vital
and carefully planned.
This ship will have some unique features.
A large atrium with a giant glass wall during the day
for people to sit and mingle.
But at night it turns into a show club.
The key question for cruise ship designers
is how do you fit more than 6,000 guests onto a boat
and not have them feel cramped?
To keep guests happy,
Carnival has put communal spaces into different zones
like the French Quarter or the Italian Piazza.
There will be a beer brewery onboard.
- As we are building bigger ships,
we want to spread people across the (mumbles),
much more diversity into the restaurant,
the sort of restaurant offering.
- The whole idea is you have to have a good time
when you're on a cruise,
and that means no crowds.
Even though there are so many people around you.
Getting people to come back is what this is all about.
Getting them to come back
is how the cruise industry will grow.
When the Mardi Gras is finished,
it will be the first ship in the world
to feature an actual rollercoaster onboard.
- For us we tend to look at
even the craziest ideas all the time.
We're interested to whatever comes.
I'm an engineer by nature,
so we force ourself to consider
whatever crazy ideas we have.
We stock them
and then we look at
where we can implement them in the future.
So there is some crazy idea
that's never came alive on the ships,
and we have some in our boxes for the future.
- The attention isn't just on the communal spaces.
Carnival had worked to maximize
the use of space in the cabins,
which are built offsite
and then slotted into the ship one by one.
Ah, this is better.
Here we are in a cabin.
But we're not at sea,
we're in a cabin factory where this mock up
of a cabin on Mardi Gras and others are put together.
Carnival hired a design firm with no experience in ships
to come up with new ideas for how to maximize space.
Here's one example.
Instead of a bedside table,
there's just a small shelf.
All you need is a place to put your phone after all.
By doing things like that,
you're actually able to save
a foot of space that was used in the bathroom.
By making the bathroom a little bigger,
they're able to put in a shower door
instead of a shower curtain.
Here's another space-saving tip.
Seems like it came straight from Ikea.
Instead of the traditional coffee table that was here,
the ottoman has storage
and a table if you need it.
The cabins all attempt to maximize
the limited space that there is,
providing flexible storage for luggage
and power and USB outlets in key places.
But even with these space-saving tricks,
it's still a cramped space.
Ship design is a really tricky thing.
You want to pack as many people in as you can
but you want them to feel comfortable,
feel like they're in a spacious cabin
even though they're in small space.
You want varied activities all over
to disperse people throughout the ship.
But all that comes at a cost: weight.
You can't have a ship that's overweight.
- So the key limiting factor to our new features
is really due to naval architecture,
a problem we have.
We are working volumes
and we are working with weight on the ships.
Weight impacts the stability of the ships
or the ships rolls and come back to the middle.
And the more weight you put to the top of the ship,
less stability you have.
- The Mardi Gras is set to sail in late 2020.
But for Mr. Clement and his team,
the innovation process continues.
- They will continue, yes.
We (mumbles) working,
we have a second ship of this class.
I'm very excited for the,
as we're working on right now.
And then we always continuing to
not only the next ships,
but we are trying to have visions for what's next
in maybe 10 years.
So you need to keep this open mind
to see what will be the ship of the future.
(marimba music)