The Challenge: Carnival Cruise Corporation wanted a new brand to attract younger travelers who were new to cruising and provide experiences that resulted in positive impacts on communities and ports to which they sailed. I was recruited to create an engaging impact-driven experience for travelers to the Dominican Republic and Cuba. On a ship. That we were going to redesign and launch in less than a year.
The Work: My role as Director of Experience flowed from strategy to design to product stewardship to supply chain to training and implementation as I led a global effort of designers, chefs, NGO’s, artists, artisans and builders to bring the experience to life. This entailed
Exploration -> Strategy: understanding the unmet needs of travelers and digging deep into the travel and cruise ship business. Understanding the perils and pitfalls of voluntourism,
Building partnerships: from content partners
The Outcome: Our experience was welcomed by travelers, with Net Promoter Scores of 68+, far higher than any in the cruise business and attracting many multiple repeat travelers during the duration of Fathom. As with 90% of intraprenurial endeavors, Fathom eventually stopped sailing but the programming lived on as we applied our design-driven approach to other Carnival brands and experiences.
Fathom 7 day journey
Making ceramic water filters for local communities
Travelers at a women's chocolate cooperative sorting cacao beans
English language immersion experience at a school near Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic
Pouring concrete floors to replace dirt ones in the homes of a Dominican village
Fathom Brand Experience
The challenge and approach of Fathom
What we built.
Fathom travelers just finished pouring concrete floors for this mother of three. She’s never had them before and she was so excited to be able to play on the floor with her kids and not worry about dirt and disease
Make the activities work for the people you want to help, not just for the volunteers
Our activity strategy incorporated community needs and skills/knowledge our travelers could share while avoiding disrupting the local economy or employment. Working in conjunction with local NGO’s, we created a series of experiences through which travelers could connect deeply with the community and become inspired to engage in their community when they returned home. Travelers could work in a women’s cacao cooperative, teach English in local schools, make and distribute ceramic water filters, plant trees, among other activities.
Zipmail at the kick-off: make in connecting and make it physical. One of our key intentions was to create an open stance among people continuously throughout the experience, connecting them in myriad ways.
Create an on-ship experience that connects people in surprising ways.
Our experience had a core principle: bring people closer together. We accomplished this by encouraging myriad interactions between travelers throughout the ship, highlighting the ‘one-to-one’ versus ‘one-to-many’ moments that are more typical to cruises. From curiosity boxes throughout the ship to sail away parties that facilitated connection to messaging throughout, we sought to create moments between people and foster a semblance of community. We also supported our travelers through workshops on curiosity, history, social impact, culture on the way to the destination to help them anticipate, understand and resolve the joy and challenges of entering someone else’s community.
Postcard wall where travelers could send a postcard to themselves highlighting the emotions and moments of their trip to remember and reinforce the experience
Make it stick.
Travelers invariably had profound visceral moments on the ground doing the impact activities: it was emotional and transformative for many. Yet the emotional half-life of a typical vacation or experience is the time it takes to get home and return to work. We also know that tangibility helps reinforce experiences: with our travelers we supported ways that they could remember their journey through artifacts like postcards to their future self, a video confessional booth and other means to reinforce the experience. We also hosted workshops on the return journey on subjects like designing your future life and social impact at home to help travelers reflect on how they could extend the experience of having a positive impact at home.