Oasis of the Seas Suits Up with New Life Jacket System
Are photos of your spouse modeling a fashionable orange life jacket in your cabin a thing of the past? In a recent blog entry, Royal Caribbean Chairman and CEO Richard Fain revealed that when Oasis of the Seas debuts this winter, life jackets will be stowed solely at muster stations rather than in passenger staterooms. Fain says that the line has already tested this out on a few other ships in the fleet to positive response.
On most mainstream ships, life jackets are stored in individual cabins -- usually in the closet, though sometimes under the bed (additional life jackets are kept at muster stations in case you are unable to reach your cabin in a real emergency). When the alarm sounds to signal the start of the safety drill (required by law), passengers have to grab their gear from their cabins and haul it (and themselves) to a designated muster station, where crewmembers explain procedures and conduct a head count. Afterward, passengers are responsible for bringing their jackets back to their cabins before they can go about their cruise business.
As Fain puts it on his blog, "it is a royal pain in the ass -- an important pain, but a pain nonetheless."
So why hasn't anyone done this sooner? After all, there are no regulations as to where life jackets must be kept -- a spokesperson for the International Maritime Organization tells us that they just need to be readily accessible and their position plainly indicated. The vests-in-cabins plan could simply be a holdover from the days when ships were smaller and deck areas couldn't accommodate the jackets.
Fain writes, "We have the space ... the advantages are so overwhelming that you have to wonder why we haven't done this before. The only answer we have come up with is that we never looked at this process as carefully before Oasis." Fain indicates on his blog that that the idea came out of a brainstorming session for Oasis. The line has also developed a digital system for real time accounting of passengers at their muster stations -- no more clipboard confusion
