Do Ships Need Magic Carpets?

A $1 billion project from Celebrity Cruises may be trying too hard.

- Fran Golden

To open the door to your stateroom on the Celebrity Edge, you use your phone. When you eat dinner on Deck 4 at Le Grand Bistro, miniature cartoon chefs are projected on your plate in 3D. The top half of a wall-size window in your Kelly Hoppen designed room lowers at the touch of a button, opening your space broadly to the sea breezes.

All the neat tricks on the 16-deck, 2,918-passenger vessel might have you considering yourself the world’s coolest cruiser. It can also leave you feeling like a fish out of water.

The ship is a $1 billion effort by Celebrity Cruises to convince skeptical young, affluent millennials that what they view as an outdated, unimaginative way of traveling really isn’t. And while it’s already a player in the premium cruise space as part of Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., Celebrity seeks to steer further into the luxury realm. Three more such ships are planned.

On the first cruise for the public, a three-night sail from Fort Lauderdale last month, millennials ate it up. “I am just intrigued by everything they are doing,” said Lydia Rodriguez, 27, from Kansas. She’d just had a body scanner snap her photo as part of an augmented-reality experience at the disco, which was done up for the night in a wild carnival style, with fortune-tellers and acrobats.