While Crystal Cruises won’t be first to develop the newest cruise trend, such as the open dining concept or the ultra-large cruise ship, their service culture gets them the #1 rank.
Travel + Leisure listed their World’s Best Awards, which are voted on by their readers. According to the website, Crystal Cruises is ranked first for Large-Ship Cruise Lines. As stated on the Crystal Cruises website, it has been voted in first place for 15 years. The July 5th, 2010 edition of TravelPress discusses how Crystal Cruises uses its high service standards as they make the change to an opening dining concept in the article Crystal Cruises aims to be ‘perfect choice.’
Crystal Cruises is not the first to implement the open dining concept, but Symphony and Serenity ships will implement the open reservation system in 2011. In the article, Thomas Mazloum, VP of operations at Crystal, points out that Crystal would be able to learn from the struggles other cruise lines had in implementing open dining. Previous large cruise ships had some difficulty handling all of the dining requests in a way that would satisfy all guests. He suggests that as Symphony and Serenity are not large, the open reservation system would be a smoother process for those ships.
Mazloum mentions that Crystal Cruises is where they wanted to be as a medium-sized ship with a “focus on individual services, without having to compromise on the choice of amenities.”
