From ship front desk assistant to steering Royal Caribbean, CEO talks about the journey
Royal Caribbean International this month unveiled key details about its latest fleet of ships. Keeping with its tradition, the cruise company is going to sail with another group of colossal ships, the Icon class, that’ll have more bells and whistles than seen previously on the high seas.
First up will be Icon of the Seas, a nearly $2 billion ship measuring 1,198 feet with 20 decks. When it starts sailing from PortMiami with up to 7,600 passengers in early 2024, it’ll have everything from an infinity pool suspended 135 feet in the air, to an ice skating rink, to the largest water park at sea and an Aquadome for water shows.
Introducing the Icon class in Miami was Michael Bayley, the man who steered Royal Caribbean through the worst of the challenging and devastating global pandemic. Hailing from the United Kingdom, Bayley, was 22 when he left his Wales home in 1981 to travel to Miami to work at the front desk of one of Royal Caribbean’s original ships. Now 64 and the chief executive of one of the world’s largest cruise lines, he’s never looked back.
The Miami Herald had a conversation with Bayley to hear about lessons learned from the lingering pandemic, his career journey, Caribbean tourism capacity, and more about the pending big ships. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
▪ Question: Are you confident you can keep people safe in the wake of the pandemic? What have you learned to prepare for the next pandemic or global emergency?
▪ Answer: We have all learned a lot during the pandemic. We were at the front of many of the discussions with many different governments, and the response we saw was dramatically different around the world. And it was a challenging time for the travel industry. Fortunately, the vaccines came and really removed the problem.
The world completely failed to acknowledge what was occurring with COVID-19. Royal Caribbean was operating in China when the pandemic began and we were aware of some of the issues that occurred at the beginning. We had conversations with authorities. I can’t tell you how shocked we were by their inability to respond, and that lack of any kind of knowledge or expertise or understanding what was happening. It was a strange time.
Now, we’ve got a great medical team. Our relationships with the health authorities — the CDC, the Caribbean Health Authority, Canadian Health Authority — we all formed really meaningful teams. We started the journey not really liking each other, and there was a perception that somehow we were not trying our best. But very quickly we realized that we had a shared vision of how we can work together.
▪ Q: Tell us about the challenges you had with crew members during the pandemic? And since the cruise industry restart in June 2021, have you experienced staffing shortages?
▪ A: With our crew members who come from over 100 different countries around the world we had a huge challenge during the beginning of the pandemic trying to get them home. And governments weren’t cooperating with each other and would inconsistently provide information. We would have approvals to send planes home that were denied at the last minute. The United Nations had to step in to express concern over global shipping, which includes cruising. There were crews on ships all over the world stuck on ships.
When we restarted our business, we ran into all kinds of challenges with shipboard employees, which make up probably a couple hundred thousand people. One of them was getting visas. U.S. Embassies cut back staffing, so they didn’t have adequate staffing to process the visas. We had some challenges in the beginning, but we were lucky. We had a period of about a month where we had some crewing issues. It’s behind us now, thankfully, and all of our ships are now fully crewed, and everything’s working.
▪ Q: The ships just get bigger and bigger. Does a limit to cruise ship size exist?
▪ A: Does there have to be a limit on things? It’s not really in human nature to be limited. I think we are always trying to improve. Within the cruise space, there are different ships at different sizes for different purposes. I think with the Icon Class, Oasis Class and many ships at Royal Caribbean, we are firmly and primarily in the American family market and what the customer expects, wants and desires is this totality experience that delivers great memories. So the size of the ship is never really the question, it’s more about how do you deliver a phenomenal vacation to your customer.
And the other thing about size of ship is that on the economic side of it, scale brings efficiency. For example, energy utilization, fuel consumption, all of those elements become more efficient as the scale increases.
▪ Q: What can cruisers expect from Icon and what is new about this class of ships?
▪ A: Icon of the Seas is Royal Caribbean International’s latest, greatest, most beautiful, stunning cruise ship. It will be the world’s best family vacation. We’re enormously proud of it. It follows a series of classes of ships that we’ve introduced over the decades, and it’s the culmination of 50 years of everything that we know. And Icon is the epitome of that.
▪ Q: What Icon features do you think customers will find most striking?
▪ A: Name anything that you would like to do and Icon has it. Whether it’s AquaDome, a structure at the top of the ship where we have aqua entertainment shows, both in the air and in the water. Or Absolute Zero, which is the world’s largest ice skating rink at sea.
If you’ve got kids, we’ve got the largest water park at sea with six of the fastest, longest, scariest dropping slides that you can possibly imagine at the very top of the ship. We’ve got Hideaway if you want to go to an exclusive zone where you can look at the sunset, and be away from all of the kids. We’ve got Cloud 17, which is where you can sneak off and have a really romantic time together. We have a stunning casino if you’d like to gamble and a wonderful spa. The Surfside ship area is designed and built for young families with kids who are six and under. We’ve got a sports park, we’ll have the World Cup showing all of the time.
▪ Q: Is it sustainable for the ports of call Royal Caribbean visits, especially small Caribbean islands, to have so many ships with so many thousands of passengers?
▪ A: I think you balance it by being very thoughtful and planning and collaborating and communicating and working with the destination. What are they concerned about? What is the economic benefit? Applying one society’s value system over another needs to be prudently thought through. The Caribbean is our partner. We have incredibly close relationships with every single Caribbean destination. We’re always talking to them about how we can improve their business, how we can better support the community, how we can bring the right kind of tourists to their community so that they can benefit from this. I think if you look at the GDP [Gross Domestic Product] of any of the Caribbean destinations, you’ll find the engagement with tourism is extremely high in some Caribbean countries.
So the question is, well, is it too many people? And when you ask the communities that we visit, the answer is no, we’re OK with how many people are coming. But we do want to have a sensible discussion about how we manage that.
▪ Q: Talk about your journey from a crew member to CEO?
▪ A: I’ve worked for Royal Caribbean almost since I was a kid, at the age of 22. I love what we do, and it’s all I’ve ever done. I started as an entry level front desk assistant on the Nordic Prince. I got on a plane in London as a young man, and landed in Miami in 1981. I spent the night in a Howard Johnson’s downtown. The next day I got in a yellow cab — I’d never been in a yellow cab, I’d never been to America, I’d never been on a plane — and I walked onboard of a ship and put my little uniform on and went to work. With no training or orientation I was told to stand here and serve our customers.
I worked on the ships of Royal Caribbean for 11 years, mainly in the Caribbean, sometimes down in South America. And over the decades, I’ve been with Royal Caribbean in various roles and responsibilities. And about nine years ago, I became the president and CEO of Royal Caribbean International.
▪ Q: What’s your personal favorite cruising memory?
▪ A: I have two kids, who are now older kids. One of the moments of great happiness for me was when we opened Perfect Day, which is Royal Caribbean’s private island theme park in the Bahamas. And I remember my younger kid had an amazing time in the water park in Perfect Day. And the next day when he woke up, he got up early and ran pulling back the drapes, looking out the window. And he said to me, where is Perfect Day? The day before we’d been in Perfect Day and the next day we’d moved to another port. And he looked right to me, he goes, oh man. He was really disappointed. That to me was a great moment because you realize that what you’ve created something that genuinely is loved.
