Peek into the colorful, immersive, and luxurious innovations shaping the future of cruising—straight from the floor of Seatrade Cruise Global, one of the cruise industry’s most important events.
From flying theaters to floating pickleball courts, this episode of Unpacked Minis, Cruise Edition takes you behind-the-scenes of the surprising sights and smells making waves in cruising.
Transcript
Joe Diaz, Afar cofounder: Did you see the attraction over there with like the VR headsets? It’s pretty insane.
Aislyn Greene, host: I have not. Let’s go check it out.
Oh my gosh. So I’m getting some definite, like, Disneyland Back to the Future ride vibes from this situation.
Joe: It’s a flying, it’s a flying theater.
Aislyn: I’m Aislyn Greene and welcome to Unpacked Minis, the cruise edition. We’re coming at you from Seatrade, a huge conference that sails into Miami every year. And today I’m walking the exhibit floor along with Afar cofounder Joe Diaz and executive sales director Colleen Schoch.
This is where any company with ties to the cruise industry gets to show off their stuff. In this episode, we’re going to meet five of them. And to find the first, well, we just followed the screams.
[Screaming]
Bar Aldo: My name is Bar Aldo. I manage western European activities for DOF Robotics.
Aislyn: Amazing. And what are we seeing here today? Because it is quite something.
Bar: Basically what you are seeing is a motion platform, which works with VR technology.
So we are creating immersive experiences for the people, for the cruises, for the decks. Actually, we are coming from the amusement entertainment industry and we mostly work for the theme parks. So we are increasing the immersive experiences for the decks to create a kind of entertainment for the cruises.
Aislyn: So what might happen? Because what I’m seeing are four people sitting in what look like amusement park seats, and then you’re just gonna strap on VR headsets and then what’s gonna happen?
Bar: This is basically a 35-square-meter thing that we are simulating whatever a rollercoaster does. It comes with many different experiences. The one that we are seeing right now is just one of those. That particular movie is about, uh, uh, let’s say a bicycle on the Wall of China. You should try it first. But you know, it’s impossible to explain really. But I mean, if you get in, you will understand how immersive it gets, basically.
Aislyn: And how have people reacted to this?
Bar: I mean, we are pretty much very much excited, but it’s, you know, everybody, you know, you see the voices and their faces. I’m having much more fun watching people watch this one.
Aislyn: I’m watching a TV screen that shows what the people in the air are seeing.
It’s kind of like a video game. It feels like I’m riding a bike on the Great Wall of China with a cyclist in front of me, and as the wall curves and the perspective shifts, so does the row of seats floating in the air and people start screaming and laughing again.
Sadly, the line is too long for me to get onboard, and I may be a little relieved because it looks a little scary. Instead, we follow a very different sound, and as it turns out, a smell too.
Aislyn [in interview]: So we followed the little steam.
Joe: We saw steam shoot up to the top of the convention center roof.
Aislyn: Would you mind starting by saying your name and what it is that you do here?
Caitlyn Hodges: Yeah. So, uh, my name’s Caitlyn Hodges and I’m with Froggy’s Fog. Uh, we’re based out of Columbia, Tennessee, which is about . . . [steam shoots up]
Aislyn: There it is.
Caitlyn: . . . uh, 45 minutes south of Nashville. So we are here at Seatrade ’cause we work with cruise lines when it comes to their special effects on their ship, such as fog, snow, haze, and bubbles, as well as scent. ’Cause we do offer scent where you can scent your atmospheric fluids or you can scent like a room space.
Aislyn: And will you tell us about that, uh, that noise and, and visual that we just saw?
Caitlyn: So that is our new, um, Hyperion TJ10.
It’s new technology that we’re releasing to the market. So a lot of people, and a lot of ships have used, uh, CO2 cannons in the past. We are replacing CO2 with water-based fog fluid, so this has turbo jet technology built into it, which will then instead, it will give the appearance of a CO2 blast without having CO2, just water-based fog fluid.
Aislyn: That’s incredible. Very eye and ear catching. And then we’re standing in front of this wall of scents, like I’m seeing chocolate-chip cookie, froggy fruit. Will you tell me—mothball?!
Caitlyn: Yeah. So we have over 63 scents in our catalog currently. So we do a lot with the haunted attraction industry. So that is why you’re seeing like mothball or slaughterhouse, rotting decay, stinky cheese, all of those. But we do have ones, like you said, chocolate-chip cookie, froggy fruits, it’s gonna be very similar to maybe a fruity cereal you eat in the morning.
Another one that a lot of people like is like rose or vanilla. We have peppermint, holiday spice when it comes to, like, Christmas time and gingerbread. So we, we do hit various different markets.
Aislyn: OK. And as a traveler, where might I smell some of these on a cruise ship?
Caitlyn: So on a cruise ship, you may smell them in your theater area, so they may use it, they may use it inside their atmospherics.
You may also smell it in like the lobby areas or anything like that that they may want, may wanna use scent in retail spaces, that sort of offerings.
Aislyn: Well, thank you, Caitlyn. You’re amazing. Can we do a little—are these, we can actually smell them right now?
Caitlyn: Open them up!
Aislyn: Alright. Um, Colleen, Joe, who’s gonna go in for one of these? I wanna get some reactions here.
Joe: I, for whatever reason, just pulled chainsaw exhaust maybe ’cause I’ve just started operating one for the first time, now that I live up in Maine.
Oh yeah, that’s got some little bit of hints of diesel to it.
Aislyn: Oh wow. That is . . .
Joe: That is not something you wanna wake up to in the morning.
Aislyn: But in a haunted house, a hundred percent could see that. Which one are you smelling, Colleen?
Colleen: I’m going for the rainforest.
Aislyn: Ooh, smart.
Colleen: It’s very, uh, mossy smelling. And I like earth.
Aislyn: Ooo. That’s nice. I like that.
Joe: Dare we go to the one that’s right next to rainforests?
Aislyn: Oh, yes, we do dare.
Joe: Uh, raw sewage.
Aislyn: Joe is our intrepid traveler here—scent traveler.
Joe: This is literally the nose for news. Oy yoy yoy. That is, that is raw.
Aislyn: Ah, OK. I think we need a chaser. What do we chase? Maybe even anything? Fresh linen? Oh, that’s really sticking in my nose.
Colleen: Coffee?
Aislyn: With the more pleasing scent of coffee in our noses, we head for a more, shall we say, expansive form of entertainment.
Mark Richard Anastasia, CEO and founder of Aquabanas: My name is Mark Richard Anastasia. That sounds so funny. Uh, no. Mark Richard Anastasia, and I’m the CEO and founder of AquaBanas.
Aislyn: I hear you’ve been waiting to do your first podcast.
Mark: You know, I’m thinking that nobody in the world is doing a podcast on commercial inflatables. And it’s a massive multi-billion-dollar market. And I’ve been doing it for 35 years and, and I, I owned a factory in China. I’ve built probably 70 or 80,000 commercial inflatables in my career.
Aislyn: Your podcast day has come.
Mark: This is my entry, my, my audition.
Aislyn: So you’re the inventor of the yacht slide, I hear. Will you tell me a little bit about what we’re seeing today?
Mark: Yeah. You know, it was, um, I used to own a factory in China and I had a customer that we were making these large land-based slides for, and so he asked me, after I’d sold my factory, he asked me if I would help him develop a slide for the yacht space.
And he showed me this concept he had that was just ridiculous. There’s no way it was gonna work. And I said, “Here, let, let me give it a shot.” And so I made this sealed air hook over the railing slide with the leg support. And it was only gonna be one slide, one—you know, one customer, one slide. And all of a sudden they took it to Monaco and they stuck it on the T-dock at Monaco, at the Monaco Yacht Show. And at the same time, the Financial Times got wind of it.
And they did this whole story with a picture of it inside one of their inside sections and it went crazy, as you can imagine. It blew up.
Aislyn: I like that you used the phrasing “blew up.” It feels very, punny, punnily on point.
Mark: You know, I, I am just gonna say, pun intended.
Aislyn: We’ll leave it at that. Well, I imagine your business has evolved quite a bit over the years because I’m seeing some really cool stuff here. Will you tell us about what we’re seeing today?
Mark: Absolutely. What we have here in the booth, this is called our “partybana.” And our partybana is a system that’s made for about 10 to 12 adults. Lemme say that also the thing about AquaBana products is that they are the only commercial inflatable product in the world designed for adults. They’re not designed for kids. So even though kids and families love them, they’re made for the ergonomics of being an adult and getting on and off of this thing. And, and it just, it makes it, you know, it’s just a different animal when you build it for that. And a lot of that has to do with when you feel the quality of how these are built.
The, the way that our rings are tested at 2,000 pounds. Everything’s high frequency here, hot air welded here, and just the, the ergonomics of sitting inside of this so that you’ve got enough room to actually sit back and relax, whether you’re my size and a shorter size, or whether you’re like really tall, you know, 180, 190 [pounds], something like that. You know, you can fit in here and sit comfortably back on it.
Aislyn: And Mark, this might be a very naive question, but this would float behind your yacht. That’s the idea?
Mark: It floats behind the yacht. It’s also made for, uh, resorts. You can put it on docks. We have a lot of people that do these to monetize them, and so they’ll, they’ll do like 10 of these and put ’em on a, on a waterfront, and then they’ll rent the things out and they’ll do table service with, with food and drink and stuff.
Or even, uh, Carnival. And their, their newest, uh, Celebration Key. They bought seven of these that they’re putting on this, uh, Starfish Lagoon. And so they’ll have those monetized where they sell ’em as excursions on the ship. So they’re already presold. Uh, we have another place, Playa Largo down in, uh, the [Florida] Keys that they, they do, they do about, well, I can’t say the number, but it’s a substantial amount of money because they sell the AquaBanas as part of their prebooking.
So when you book the hotel and you do your reservation, “Hey, you want the ticket for the AquaBanas?”
Aislyn: As we turn to leave, something else catches our eye.
Mark: Did you see this?
Aislyn: No.
Mark: The world’s first full- size, full-regulation- size floating pickleball, of course.
Aislyn: No…
Joe: Of course. Of course you do.
Mark: Of course. Absolutely. Somebody had to.
Joe: How many square feet is this?
Mark: Twelve thousand12,000 square feet.
Joe: Wow.
Mark: And this will hold, you can put about 80 people on this. While you have two different teams that are playing pickleball back and forth. This is great for excursions and this particular one is meant for going on the beach.
So you can walk across the walkway, stay dry, and then get in here and play pickleball. It is insane how well it works. And so this is, look, look for this to really blow up, no pun intended, later this year.
Aislyn: You are truly a genius. And roll with the times, clearly.
Mark: Absolutely, absolutely. Get it while I can.
Aislyn: Next, we make our way to a booth where people in hazmat suits are pouring what looks like brightly colored paint over the top of small Styrofoam bears. So, of course, I ask if I can get in on the action.
Signature sales rep: Be sure to really cover everything because, um, when it’s on, you cannot get it off.
Aislyn [in interview]: OK. I am putting on a giant hazmat suit, booties, gloves, I’m about to resin a bear, which will apparently be sent to me?
Aislyn: Now I’m standing in front of a bear that’s about a foot tall. That I’m fully covered and we begin to paint.
Signature sales rep: The best way to cover the bears is just to get the cups and start letting it pour down the bear, and it’ll start hardening as you go, as the time passes. So you can go ahead and start layering that. Don’t be afraid to mix. Use your fingers, whatever you want. It’s an arts and craft class.
Aislyn: How many people walk away with resin on them?
Signature sales rep: Honestly, we haven’t had any accidents, so let’s keep it that way. Let’s keep it that way. We are not liable for anything that happens to you here today.
Aislyn: So I’m enjoying this extra colorful, build-a-bear experience. But the product this booth is actually selling to cruise lines might surprise you.
Signature sales rep: So these are the same products we use on the cruise decks. We do the decking for the vessels and with these colors we usually do basketball courts, jogging tracks, the waiting areas. This system is called our Select Hard System, which is composed of two components, A and B.
Aislyn: As I pour resin all over my bear, I learn more about what I’m actually doing here.
Arlette Benard: My name is Arlette Benard. I’m working for Bolidt.
Aislyn: Basically, Bolidt makes a range of environmentally friendly deck and floor systems for all the major cruise lines using resin, and that’s what we’re pouring over the bears.
Arlette: So you see the, the pouring is the way that you can manage different, um, color combinations.
Aislyn: They’re especially well known for their Signature product, which looks and feels like teak, but is also made of resin. And the wall behind the bear pouring project is covered in it.
Arlette: So as you can see, it’s really, uh, a lookalike of teak. Nowadays with teak there are so many, um, uh, questions about, uh, where it comes [from] exactly. So this is a different way of getting a, a teak um, deck, which is not really teak, but uh, our own product. Officially, it’s Bolidt TechFuture Teak Signature Premium.
Aislyn: That is a mouthful.
Arlette: Yeah, that’s a lot.
Aislyn: I’ve covered my Styrofoam bear in lime, orange, yellow, and teal resin, and now it’s going to harden for 24 hours before it’s shipped to me. I’m thinking maybe Bearson Pollock for the name, hmm? As I ponder, we stumble on a much more . . . well, polished design display.
Daniil Piazenko: So, I’m, uh, Daniil, we are from a company called Zenko HF Interior. We are a Lithuanian company and the chief interior is the Swedish company. And now we are joined forces to provide, uh, full scope of interior solutions. So actually we’re standing now in the booth, which is completely designed by us, produced by us, and, uh, manufactured and installed.
Aislyn: Their booth here at Seatrade represents what they can do on a cruise ship. It’s like we’ve walked into a bar with a library vibe, all centered around a detailed and very beautiful representation of a Scandinavian tree.
Daniil: And if you see the carpet, actually that’s the roots of the tree. Ah, so the carpet was as well manufactured just for this exhibition.
Aislyn: The company’s eye for immersive detail has been used by one of the most creative cruise lines in the business.
Daniil: Yeah, so actually the Disney cruise line, the latest ship, Disney Treasure. So we completed 4,500 square meters of public areas there. So that includes the entertainment, restaurant, boutiques: 23 restaurants, uh, and a bar and uh, food court.
Aislyn: Wow, that’s huge.Can you describe the kind of overall aesthetic?
Daniil: Uh, honestly saying Disney cruise ships are very different from other ships. They’re, they are, they’re the masterpiece. They’re amazing because, uh, each, each area represents the history of Disney. So, uh, the entertainment restaurant on the latest ship was, uh, representing the story of Coco, the movie by Disney, Coco.
So it was completely designed in the theme of Mexican style. We had the roots inside, we had the palm trees, we had, uh, Mexican-style walls. Uh, when the ship, we were handing over the ship and it was built in Papenburg, Germany, Disney flew their team from the United States of artists, and they were actually painting by hand. All the paintings, all the decorations were painted onboard by hand, by the people from Disney. So that just shows, uh, the details they’re putting inside the cruise ships to, to, to actually give the maximum experience to the customers and to the, uh, sailors.
Aislyn: How long does it take from design to execution with a ship? I imagine that’s a pretty long and involved process.
Daniil: I mean, uh, it might start four years before the cruise ship even starts building. And the, the execution actually, if we are talking about new buildings, so the Disney project was complete in nine months. Uh, we had, uh, around 150 people working all the time to complete all the zones, but in the end, the result was, uh, just amazing.
Aislyn: I’m sure that’s a lot of, a lot of moving parts. Do you guys ever talk about like the psychology of design and how that will impact cruise passengers and travelers?
Daniil: Uh, yes, definitely. Um, you can actually see in this booth, so the, the colors are very light and inviting. So, uh, if we take the whole colors of the expo, they’re quite dark or quite shiny. Pink carpets, blue carpets. And this was, uh, as you can see, LEDs, soft light. Uh, these were, these were designed especially to attract people so they feel they want to come in, so they feel like home. It’s a warm place where you want to sit, where you want to be. So it is the same onboard the cruise ships. Some zones are expected to be more shiny so people maybe come spend some time and live and, uh, places like restaurants, they should be inviting, where people want to stay, have a good time and so on.
Aislyn: Well, it worked. It pulled us right in and I’d love to just kind of cozy up to this bar and spend the rest of the day here, but we have to move on. Thank you so much for your time. It was nice to meet you.
Daniil: Thank you.
Aislyn: These are just a handful of the many innovations that come out of Seatrade each year. Honestly, it opened my eyes to the hundreds of companies that come together to make a cruise ship possible. So just a little food for thought on your next sailing. You’ll find links to all of the companies we featured in the show notes. And join us next week for another Unpacked Mini: Cruise Edition where we share the most interesting and surprising culinary trends coming soon to a ship near you.
