Carnival has opened the doors to its second fleet operations centre as the cruiseship giant expands a global network of facilities to manage operations of its 102 ships.
The company's Seattle facility follows the October 2015 opening of its first centre in Hamburg. Carnival plans to open a third facility at its Miami headquarters late this year.
The fleet operation centres use tracking and data analysis to improve ship-to-shore communications and improve safety and operational efficiency.
Sophisticated system
"Our teams have done a remarkable job in developing the most sophisticated and capable system in the cruise and commercial maritime industry for taking safety management to a completely new level, overcoming the hurdles faced with ships sailing in the middle of oceans around the world," said Bill Burke, Carnival's chief maritime officer
The Hamburg fleet operations centre has been piloting a cloud-based system called Neptune that will now be rolled out for the US and Caribbean operations.
And the operations centres will process and analyse "big data" to generate safety alerts from shore to ships at sea.
The moves are part of Carnival's efforts to take a fleetwide approach to vessel safety and operations.
The company has set up a training centre in the Netherlands that has training programmes for 6,500 deck and engine officers.
"We have gone from having six separate safety management systems to one corporate safety management system," Stein Kruse, who head's Carnival's Seattle-based Holland America Group, told TradeWinds before today's announcement.
Same guiding principles
"[All] ships in Carnival Corporation are now being operated with the same philosophy and same underlying guiding principles."
Burke said the operations centres and Carnival's proprietary technology make sure that the cruise giant is far exceeding industry safety standards.
"We can now also access and analyse data that can significantly increase the operational efficiency of our ships, which is another major benefit," he said.
