A Viral Cruise Ship Is Freaking Everyone Out. His Warped Mind Helped Create It.

The memory of the OceanGate submersible disaster and all its attendant hubris was still very fresh when an artist’s rendering of a new cruise ship, set to be the biggest in the world, went viral last month. As soon as some social media users laid eyes on Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, which was festooned with interlocking waterslides and a seemingly absurd number of pools, they were quick to denounce it as a dystopian monstrosity, a monument to tackiness, a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. (For real.) Headlines about the polarizing vessel quickly followed. “Royal Caribbean’s Massive Icon of the Seas Ship Is Freaking People Out,” read one.

Were we all too harsh on the ol’ Icon? Cruises aren’t for everyone, but they have their fans, and maybe those fans really enjoy waterslides. Jay Schneider, a chief product innovation officer at Royal Caribbean, agreed to defend the ship’s honor to Slate. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Heather Schwedel: What was the original vision for the Icon of the Seas?

Jay Schneider: We’ve been working on Icon since 2016–2017, if you go back to our original memo that starts off a new class of ship. Typically, that process is about aspiration. It doesn’t detail things like “We want a ship that weighs 250,000 tons.” Instead, it’s aspirational and rooted in what we would say as a headline. This ship’s headline is “This is the best family vacation on the planet.”

There have been some strong reactions to the maximalist look of the ship, with some people finding it overwhelming. Why did you go in that direction?

We didn’t start with the world’s largest ship. The ship was actually smaller in its initial design. But as we went through the creative journey, we did more research with our guests, and we found that this is what they want. So far, it’s paid off. This has been our most successful launch of a ship ever. It’s selling very well, and the guest reception has been through the roof. We’re excited that by rooting a new class of ship maniacally in what our guests were looking for and by going through such a unique design process, we created something people really love.

Now, will there be people that say this is too much? Of course. The beauty is, we have a fleet of ships that speaks to everybody.

Can you tell me more about the theme park on the ship?

Thrill Island really came together in the past two years. Certain things were locked in, like the staterooms. But what we noticed as we were designing this is, we had put all the adrenaline-pumping thrills in the same spot for the first time ever. And literally in a meeting, somebody said, “You know, we have, like, an island or collection of thrills.” We went through a little bit of a creative charrette and decided to create Thrill Island. We wrote this statement that said, “What if Thrill Island was like the Bermuda Triangle for thrill seekers, and what if it was a windswept lost island, and what if we really leaned into thematic design?” We talked about this notion that you’d have these two creative zones, an active storm zone, and the post-storm aftermath on the other side of the ship. Both of those are meant to give us kind of a creative framework of how the island was hit by a storm.

Where do you start when you’re planning out an on-ship theme park?

We’ve got a ton of feedback from guests on the type of things they’re looking for. We know people love family-raft slides. We know they love single-drop slides. We know what works for a water park experience. And then we start to think big and dream crazy.

We design in 3D. People are sketching, people are drawing on whiteboards, they’re building 3D models. Eventually, they’re physically going to the ship, and it’s a very iterative process. We then also have a warehouse on our campus where we then build up full-size mock-ups. It’s not easy to send, you know, 30 or 40 people to a shipyard in Finland. And so we’ll build up a mock-up so people can try it out.

How do you figure out which wild ideas you have for features on a ship are actually feasible and which aren’t?

If we can’t do something, in some cases it’s time, in some cases it’s water. One of the ideas we had was a seven-story waterslide that went all the way down and had a way for riders to quickly get back up and do it again. This ship has more water on it than any other ship on the planet. It’s got 62 percent more water than our previous record ship. One of the things that we have to be very careful about is the engineering weight of water high up on a ship. We go through a pretty rigorous process to say, “OK, if we want to do a waterslide like that, a waterslide is a constant flow of water, so you’ve got to be able to get water from the bottom all the way back up to the top to be able to keep that flow going or figure out what to do with it.” So, from an engineering standpoint, we study all of the crazy ideas that we have.

And then we have to make trade-offs. We literally had to say, “OK, we wanted water here, but we’ve taken too much water in the water park. Are we OK that this isn’t a water experience?” We had to go through that journey as well. There’s a spot elsewhere in the ship where we once had a hot tub that we couldn’t do because we literally ran out of water weight. So those are some of the trade-offs we do. It involves people with a ton of different specialties. You’ve got to balance off naval engineering, architecture, design, guest flow, and then raw ambition.

One of the elements that really stands out in the photos is the slides. Can you tell me more about them?

The on-ship water park is called Category 6. We’ve created our own hurricane level. Our waterslides on other ships are called Perfect Storm because you’re going through kind of a storm experience. We wanted to take that up a level. It happened to align that we had six waterslides. I believe this is the world’s first water park at sea, because nobody’s ever put six slides on a ship before. We’re making up the definition that a water park means you have six slides. We’re taking that creative liberty. [Editor’s note: There are other ships out there that claim to have water parks on board, some of which boast four or five slides.]

But why stop at six slides?

Would I take a seventh slide if I could? Sure. We went through the journey of what it would look like if you took a slide from Thrill Island down to another area called Surfside, and there were real, fundamental things that we would do that would probably have made that work, but it would have compromised too many other things. So I’m OK that we’re not doing it.

What are some of the attractions you’re most excited about?

We have a slide that’s cantilevered over the ocean, so, technically, you’re flying over the ocean. I was in our yard a couple months ago, doing a site tour. And our chairman said, “Something doesn’t feel right because these hubs are so damn big. It doesn’t make sense that you need this.” We got in it, and I’m almost 6 feet tall, and I could stand and barely touch the top of the tube. I had to remind him that it’s because we’re putting the first four-person family slide on a ship, and so you need big tubes. And so it’s just indicative that the size is intense and, frankly, amazing.

On some of our ships, we have zip lines. And again, in the spirit of really taking adrenaline pumping to the next level, we had this idea of “Why not push people over the ocean?” You’re 150 feet above the ocean while the ship’s moving. I think our CEO said, “Why the hell would we do this?” And my answer was, “Why the hell not?”

How do you figure out how many pools to put on a ship and where to put them? And bars and restaurants?

We heard in research that guests wanted access to water and they wanted to experience water. That’s why they go on a cruise. And it doesn’t just mean being in the water. It’s actually connecting with the ocean around you. And so you’ll notice that we have more pools that face the ocean than face inward and the classic cruise ship design. There are seven pools throughout the ship.

We think a lot about habitability. How do you go spend a day in a neighborhood? To do that, you need to have something to entertain you. You need to have access to drinks, cocktails, and food, so it’s all about strategically positioning these things so people can quickly access them. We don’t want you to have to walk from one end of the ship all the way to the other end of the ship to do it. So we’re very conscious of the distance any one guest has to go and how far they have to go to get access to food and beverage.

How do you pick the bright colors for the slides? Are there, like, very serious discussions about the specific shade of fuchsia to use?

Somewhere in our office, there is a row of colors that match every slide you saw on Icon. And we went through a process to make sure all of them felt right. We built a mock-up of the pool and hideaway on Icon. We painted it and we filled it with water because we wanted to try different colors, and water skews colors, and so does light. So in our parking lot, we built a pool. We painted it four different colors and we put water in it, and we went and looked at it at different times in different sun conditions. And the pool you will see is the color that felt the best and looked the most awesome out of the choices that we had.

One of the things we do spend a lot of time on is called practicability, and that’s the wear and tear. What colors and gloss are likely to wear and tear the least, give us longevity, and look the same? We spend a lot of time thinking about the maintenance of the color choices we make, the fabric choices we make, and the chair choices we make.

Are there other things you built to test out?

We’re testing a new elevator technology, and so we took over our conference center on one of our ships and built a mock-up of the entire elevator core and then ran guests through it. They literally were testing the next generation of elevators for us.

We also do things like chair showcases, so we look at every type of chair, we sit in every chair, we lay in every lounger to make sure that we think guests are gonna love it. We get different-sized guests in it because you know somebody who’s 6’5” vs. 4’11” is gonna feel a different way.

Are you working on other things beside the Icon, or is it all Icon all the time?

I oversee the development of our ships as well as the development of our private destinations, so our land-based new experiences we’re going to create. We’re also working on Utopia of the Seas, which is the sixth ship in the Oasis class. We also have Icon 2 and Icon 3 that are coming out, so we’re working on those ships in parallel. And then I can’t talk about any future ships we’re working on that we don’t have orders for publicly. Icon 2, 3, and Utopia kind of take us through 2026, but if you think of the timescale, you got to keep going if you’re thinking of the late ’20s, early ’30s.

How is working on “land-based experiences” different from working on the ships?

With them, you don’t have to worry about naval engineering constraints, like how much water is on the top deck. They both have their own environmental needs that have to be carefully managed. The other thing that we talk about a lot is that a ship moves from destination to destination, but a private destination stays at a destination, and so the cultural needs are very different. The community needs are very different—or more amplified maybe is a better way to say it. But from a design perspective, the design process is actually relatively the same. We start with a memo. The only difference is you don’t have to deal with the naval architects. But then you often have other issues to deal with, which is, you know, marine development and pier development and wave studies.

What are some things you’re working on for future ships?

One of the things that we’re introducing on Utopia of the Seas is a new concept called the dining car. We hear consistently in all research that people go on vacations to go visit destinations for the food. So we’ve been chasing different versions of immersive dining. What if you could put a train on a ship and take people to multiple destinations? What would that architecturally look like if we did it? It’s physical and digital blended together. There’s technology that takes you to the destination, but we’re literally going to build trains—like, it’s going to be a metal train, it’s gonna feel like a dining car. We’ve been studying to understand what speed of footage on the screens plus a little bit of movement will be the right movement to simulate a train moving but not make you nauseous but still keep you in the moment.

What’s something you’ve gotten wrong in designing ships?

In part of the pandemic, we tested a piece of technology that would allow you to sit in the pool deck and use our app to have food and drink brought to you. We’d see other people doing it. Some of our competition does it. But it was also being done at the same time we were chasing more access to complimentary food in the pool deck. One of the things we’ve heard over time is that guests want access to complimentary food. The two of those were kind of running in parallel. We attached a delivery fee to the ability for you to do it with the app. What we learned is, yes, it’s nice and convenient to have food brought to you. However, on the flip side, if you charge even a 99 cent delivery fee, it’s just as easy for me to tell my kid to go get me fries from the venue that’s right there.

There’s no perfection in all of it. We’ll get things wrong. We know we will get things wrong. And in some cases, we’re OK that we get them wrong because they were in the spirit of a strategy we were chasing that we wanted to try, and that’s OK because we’ll test and adjust our way forward.