Innovating at Royal Caribbean
Jay Schneider, Chief Product Innovation Officer, Royal Caribbean Group
Jay Schneider is the Senior Vice President & Chief Product Innovation Officer at Royal Caribbean where he leads product development and innovation teams focused on creating new concepts and products that transform the guest experience. His previous roles include leadership positions at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts as VP of Digital Guest Experience.
Jay is most passionate about leveraging human-centered design and technology to create magical experiences that exceed customer expectations. He has over 20 years of experience spearheading digital transformation and product innovation.
In today’s interview, we talk about:
Designing dream vacations
Immersive dining car experiences
Royal Caribbean’s innovation process
Power of prototyping
AI’s impact on vacations
What follows below is a condensed and lightly edited version of our interview.
Jay, I love your job. Before we get into the how, can you share with us what are some of the innovative ideas you are working on? Either you have just launched or are about to launch.
Jay Schneider: Mustafa thanks for having me.
As the Chief Product Innovation Officer at Royal Caribbean, I have one of the best jobs in the world - designing incredible vacation experiences for our guests.
For example, we are developing the world’s largest kinetic art sculpture for our Icon of the Seas ship. This sculpture will feature more than 3500 moving tiles orchestrated together with custom software, lights, and sound – something that's never been done before at this scale.
We're also working on new dining experiences, looking at how we can integrate more green energy into our ships and destinations, and designing fresh island beach clubs to surprise and delight our guests.
Ultimately, my goal is to create vacation memories that our guests will treasure forever. The technology involved may be complex, but the emotion behind it is quite simple – helping families and friends have the best time ever when they sail with us.
I love the dining car idea, can you share more? Why did you focus on trains? What experience are you trying to deliver to your customers?
JS: The dining car concept has been an incredibly fun and rewarding project for our team.
When we first started exploring ideas, immersive dining kept rising to the top of our research. People want to feel transported when they dine on vacation, they want something they don’t normally get at home.
So we began brainstorming - how could we leverage the existing assets of our ships to create a truly immersive experience? Trains evoke feelings of adventure, take you to new destinations, and have that nostalgic dining car. We realized we could build our own fantastical train that travels to anywhere in the world or universe!
Our team had a blast mocking up concepts, filming test footage, and prototyping different train interiors. Of course, executing this at scale took meticulous design. We didn't want guests getting motion sickness from shaky screens. Every detail from naming the train station to choreographing entertainment had to reinforce the immersive experience.
The result is something we're incredibly proud of - a dining experience where guests feel fully transported. Whether it's the Wild West with grits and steak or the exotic Silk Road, we're giving people memories they'll treasure forever.
At the end of the day, that emotional connection is what matters most to us.
Designing vacations is very different than writing software, marrying the physical and the digital is never easy. Tell me more about your process. What is your secret sauce?
JS: Bringing innovative concepts like the dining car to reality has not been easy but it has been a lot of fun.
It starts with understanding our guests' deepest vacation desires. Extensive focus groups, surveys, and observational studies reveal the insights that spark our ideation. When an immersive dining idea resonates in concept testing, we know we're onto something special.
Next is bringing that spark to life - that's where rapid prototyping transforms the dream into reality. We start with mocked-up facades and test footage, just enough to convey the vision and win over skeptics. With key stakeholders rallied around the concept, we can pressure test and refine it to perfection.
Cross-functional teams are critical to work out all the intricacies of execution. Our best engineers, designers, and operators iterate on how to seamlessly integrate this innovation into the broader on-board experience. It's a complex undertaking, but their creativity and problem-solving make it possible.
I will tell you, it is a lot of work. But the reward is seeing that initial creative spark evolve into an insanely awesome, one-of-a-kind guest experience.
Jay, you are a big fan of prototyping. How do you prototype on a ship?
JS: Prototyping has been essential to bringing innovative concepts like the dining car to life. I'm thrilled you asked about this part of the process because it's so important and often underestimated.
While building full-scale mockups does require an investment, it's modest compared to the overall scope of these projects. We're talking tens of thousands, not millions. To me, that's money well spent if it gets key stakeholders on board. For the dining car, we built a simple 4-window facade in our warehouse so people could experience the simulated footage we captured. It brought the idea to life instantly!
We take the same approach with digital concepts too. A week of coding can mock up an interface and interactions that sell people on a new software idea. Other times, we'll use cardboard and props to envision a physical space. I'm obsessed with mocked-up prototypes because they transform skepticism into enthusiasm.
Of course, executing all this at scale on an actual ship and integrating it with other experiences is extremely complex. But those early prototypes give life to the dream and vision. They enable our teams to rally around an idea, work through the details, and deliver something amazing for our guests. I can't overstate the impact they have in getting innovative concepts off the ground!
As you try to innovate, use techniques like prototyping. Have you had any pushback from the organization? What have been the challenges?
JS: Transforming a company's approach to innovation is no easy feat. Especially when you've got centuries of tradition and established processes behind you. But I'm a big believer that any operation can get jazzed about prototyping if you show them the light!
When I first joined Royal Caribbean, mockups and rapid testing weren't the norm outside of shipbuilding. However, I knew from experience that hands-on prototypes could ignite that spark and rally people around new ideas.
Like when we did that mixed-reality dining demo back in 2017. Sure it was kludgy - wires everywhere, processing separate from the headset. But it brought an immersive restaurant vision to life and got leadership excited. That experience paved the way for bolder innovations on the horizon.
Now we're mocking up full ship neighborhoods, painting test pools, and beyond to pressure test concepts in real life. And it's unlocking creativity across teams.
Of course, shifting mindsets doesn't happen overnight. You've still got concrete middle naysayers to win over.
But I ask - why not try? What's the harm in prototyping an idea or just asking if regulations could evolve? More often than not, you unlock possibilities. Like revolutionizing embarkation security through facial recognition technology.
Can you tell me more about the facial recognition example you just mentioned?
JS: Yes, that was a real turning point for us and the team on the power of innovating and prototyping.
For ages, embarkation was this painful slog - long lines, overloaded checkpoints, and hours of waiting. As our ships got bigger, it kept getting worse.
I knew there had to be a better way. So we started prototyping concepts using facial recognition tech to revolutionize the process. But we were told the Coast Guard would never approve the untested tech for passenger security.
Well, I wasn't satisfied with that answer. I pushed our team to engage the Coast Guard in an open dialogue about a new approach. We showed them our prototypes and vision. And whaddya know - they saw the potential too! With one simple addition they requested, we got the green light.
By pre-registering guest photos and leveraging facial recognition, we collapsed a 2-hour embarkation process into 10 minutes flat. It's been a total game changer that our guests love.
It just goes to show that if you prototype bold ideas and keep an open mind, you can overcome even the biggest barriers to innovation. We transformed boarding by challenging assumptions and having a constructive dialogue with regulators. It was one of our biggest breakthroughs, no question.
One last question. Almost everyone is talking about AI, what are you doing or planning to do? Any use cases you can share with us?
JS: You raise a great point - generative AI is top of mind for every company these days.
At Royal Caribbean, we're taking a methodological approach to integrating these emerging technologies into the vacation experiences we create.
There's tremendous potential in areas like automation and using AI to deliver helpful information to guests and employees. Those are "safe" starting points we're actively exploring.
But for a people-focused hospitality business delivering incredibly complex physical vacation experiences, we have to be thoughtful about risks too. We don't want to jeopardize the human connections and joy that make our cruises special.
Right now we're prototyping an AI-based chatbot with a human in the loop on our ships. The goal is to combine chatbots and human agents so customers always feel supported, and never stuck in frustrating automated loops.
AI has an important role in our innovation vision. We'll integrate AI carefully to augment the physical vacation.
Jay, this has been great. Thanks for being such a great guest.
JS: Mustafa thanks for having me. This has been a lot of fun.