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honors from Princeton, a law degree from Harvard and a master's degree in business ad-
ministration with distinction from a top European business school.
Three months after my cruise aboard the
Navigator of the Seas
, he agreed to a rare in-
terview at his Miami headquarters, next to the pier where Royal Caribbean cruise ships
are docked. We talked for more than an hour in his sunny, relaxed executive suite. It was
March and the weather was ideal; he planned to go running once the interview was over.
He answered the industry's critics with ease, once accusing them of snobbery. His main
defense was the popularity of cruises. “The single most important driver of our success is
how happy we make our customer. So you can talk about other things, you can talk about
legal or tax regimes and you can have that conversation, but if we didn't make our custom-
ers really happy on a regular basis at the highest level that we know of in travel and leisure,
none of the rest of it would matter.”
To accommodate everyone—families, teenagers, party-hearty couples and singles, re-
tired people and the multigenerational groups—modern cruise ships are designed to cre-
ate “zones.” Like Disneyland, the layout of the ship considers moving traffic at meal times,
or through high-volume shopping and gaming areas, theaters and sports areas.
Goldstein used the image of an accordion when describing how every taste and age is
considered on the ship. For example, this is how a cruise works well for a family reunion.
“The family stretches out during the day, the grandparents doing what they like, the
parents do what they like, the children doing what they like, and then they all get togeth-
er at dinner,” he said. “They talk about what they did today and what they are going to
do tomorrow and they talk about whatever else they talk about, and then when the din-
ner is over, the accordion stretches out again and they go off to their respective pursuits
again . . . . And that only works if each generation is constantly finding some programming
that they like.”
That level of service and entertainment at such low prices explains the success, and
those low prices depend on paying very low wages to crew members.
Goldstein said that it was wrong to compare cruise wages to American pay. Rather, he
said, the pay should be compared to what crew members would receive in their home
countries—the Philippines, Turkey, Serbia or India.
“We do have a different wage scale,” he said. “Wherever you are on the land, the em-
ployees are sourced from that country, they live there. And in our case, what we are able to
do is, we are able to generate fantastic opportunities for people from a variety of countries
around the world.
“Typically what they are able to earn from us is significantly greater than what they are
earning if they would have stayed where they were,” Goldstein said. “So our view, not sur-
prisingly, is that we provide fantastic employment opportunities to people from around the
world that would not otherwise exist.”
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