Carnival Corporation operates more than 80 cruise ships, and on most of them their passengers can enjoy the pleasures of casino gaming. Of course, the scale of the casino operation differs from ship to ship, dependent on the size of the ship, the average length of the voyage, the demographic of the passengers the company expects to be on board and much, much more. Carnival’s Vice President Casino Operations, Rodney Dofort, kindly gave up his time to answer Casino International’s questions about the ‘nuts and bolts’ of gaming at sea.

Casino International: How many slot machines are under your guidance across all the cruise ships?

Rodney Dofort: 10,500.

CI: How does that break down per ship?

RD: The smallest casino is on the five star luxury Seabourn brand. It has seven slot machines to serve 212 guests. When you are talking about the many ships we have that carry 2,600 – 3,400 or more guests , the casino will normally have 220 – 260 slots.

CI: How many gaming tables, in total? And what’s their distribution?

RD: 870. The smallest has two tables, going up to the mega-ships which are normally no more than 17 or 18 tables.

CI: How are slot machines maintained on board? Are they maintained by your own staff or shuffled out of the way in the even of failure?

RD: The limitations of working on a cruise ship is there’s very little spare room, so your slots will always be up on their stands. On bigger ships, you might have as many staff as a slot manager, three or four technicians and a couple of slot attendants. For the smaller ships, where you can’t afford to assign a technician full time we have a very efficient group of roving fleet technicians, who will come on board a ship in a foreign port to carry out maintenance. Alternatively, because we have so many ships all over the world, when something does go wrong the Manager can look at the itinerary schedule, email another ship and ask them if they can assist. Then the technicians will simply come over while they’re in port and fix the problem.

CI: You must have tremendous buying power as a company – how do you pick what machines to buy?

RD: We do face certain limitations that most landbased casinos don’t. Because we have a large number of relatively small slot floors, it’s very, very detrimental if you make a mistake in your machine selection. If you’re running a 3,000 machine casino and buy 15- 20 games that don’t work, you can always move them around the floor, into back corners or wherever. When you’re running 150 machines, you have to be very good because you can’t just take them off again; the depreciation would kill you. It would be like buying a car and immediately selling it, you lose a lot of money. So we do spend a lot of time selecting at shows, and we probably run close to the typical distribution of a Vegas casino. IGT would be the largest supplier on most of our ships. Williams and Bally are in there, and we have slots from Konami, Atronic and the like but they’re a smaller group. Also, for example, we have ships sailing out of Australia, and those ships are pretty much all Aristocrat slots, mostly the penny Australian games.

CI: Is that just a brand recognition thing for that territory’s customers?

RD: Well, a typical Australian player is mostly interested in the one- or two-cent games that they play at home. Essentially, we do select our equipment as far as possible according to the predominant mix of guests coming on board.

CI: What are the table games you run?

RD: We run the standard Blackjack, Roulette and Craps, plus Three-Card Poker, Let It Ride and Caribbean Stud Diamond Edition, which is a game where the jackpot is linked across a large number of ships. We also run a couple of Blackjack varieties with additional options, but that’s pretty much it on the gaming side. Down in Australia we might offer pontoon, that goes across quite well down there. We’ve done a fair sized installation of Texas Hold’Em in the last year, I’d say we put out at least 50 tables between 30 ships.

CI: What are generally the most profitable games for you?

RD: It depends on the type of passenger you have on, and the length of itinerary is a significant issue. The funny thing is, we don’t as a corporation consider ourselves a casino company; we’re a vacation company. The foundation of our business is that a cruise is incredible vacation value and the casino is only ever one of the many, many entertainment areas on board. As a result, we don’t really advertise or promote it to a great extent. I’ve often said that much less than one tenth of one per cent of our guests come on board with the casino as their main focus. They come on board to cruise, all the entertainment on board is free and it’s very, very good entertainment. So the job of the casino is purely to cater to those who want to enjoy it rather than convince people that they need to find it.

CI: Do you work to a set ratio when deciding how many game tables or slots to install, for example XX amount of passengers equals X amount of games?

RD: Unfortunately casinos, in the pecking order of ship design, come quite low down the tree. When you’re building a ship, there’s a whole lot of factors that are a fixed in relation to the number of guest cabins:- dining facilities, crew cabins, deck space, seats in public lounges et cetera. What usually happens is that you don’t get an whole lot of input into the actual size, shape or location of the casino. Right now I think we have 16 ships on order for delivery in less than four years, so that’s 16 separate casino designs we are currently planning. We know what space we’ve got, but at this stage we only have a general idea of the demographic mix of passengers and the itineraries these ships might be on. If a ship’s going on a three-, four- or five-day Caribbean cruise, it will do much more business than a ship that goes on a 12-day Panama Canal crossing or an Alaska cruise. Essentially you’re designing without all the input that’s necessary. Even if you know what it’s going to start out as, that doesn’t mean the ship will stay in that sort of market. So once the ship comes out of, say, the Caribbean and goes to Europe for the summer, the level of business changes quite dramatically. So we do not have a ratio that’s laid out – though quite possibly it’s an instinctive thing that we do – if we have a ship with 3,000 lower berths right now, anywhere in the order of 200 to 230-240 slot machines would probably be the number, and about 17 tables.

CI: How do you select which tables and equipment you’re going to buy? Is there anyone you really favour?

RD: We use three table manufacturers at the moment; one local outfit, CC&D, here in Florida who’ve done a number of ships for us, TCSJohnHuxley, and in certain brands we use Abbiati, an Italian company out of Turin. The objective is not to provide a cookie-cutter casino across all fleets, you try to give each fleet their own unique style. The Abbiati brand, for example, we use for the Costa Cruise Lines in Italy, and for Cunard, and by doing so we reinforce the European style of the product over there.

CI: How are the casinos outfitted on the ships? You said you’re restricted by available size, so what kind of look or flavour do you try and achieve?

RD: During my 23 years with the company I have seen a very wide variety of ship and casino designs. We’ve had ships that have been very modern or even futuristic and sometimes they tend to age more rapidly, while other ships that have come out with classic styling may never seem to age. It’s rather like wearing a blue blazer which is in style year after year, but if you wear bell-bottom pants it dates you. As a new ship comes out, the architect will give us some idea of their concept and we will try and carry it through into the casino design. We’ve had ships themed after, for example, Gauguin, Louis XIVth, horse racing or legends, and we will work around that, researching the subject and using motifs and relevant design features to complement it. Other ships casinos will come out with simple understated elegance and no theming; you take your guidance from the architect, and the general styling of presentation to the guests of that particular brand.

CI: A cruise ship is potentially going in and out of many territories; when you’re coming in to port, presumably you have to adhere to local gaming law. Does this cause problems for you?

RD: It’s complex because of the number of ports we sail into around the world. There are territorial water limits in all different part of the world, and local laws that are enforced in place of, or in addition to, national laws... It’s complex to track the issue. In general we’ll err on the side of caution and close rather than risk anything.

CI: How much do you feel you have to keep up with advances in technology, within gaming?

RD: We do have one of the most advanced slot systems anywhere complete with direct cash back rebates and personal banking. This is already fleetwide on Carnival and is just starting to be introduced on Princess on the brand new Crown Princess out of New York. We do run Touchbet Roulette, and were possibly the first to do that at sea, on the Arcadia of P&O in the UK. We experimented with it just to see how it would be accepted by the guests on board. The problem we face is that some of the technology out there is priced for 24-hour-a-day casinos and pretty large volume. When you operate a casino that runs maybe 90 hours a week, or less on the tables, and with only a limited number of guests on board able to play, the economics aren’t necessarily in your favour. You have to be very careful that you are cost effective in your technology selections. You could provide the most technologically advanced casino on a relatively quiet ship and go bust.

CI: Is there any difference in people’s playing habits in relation to the length of the cruise or size of the ship?

RD: The number one change in playing habits is that when I joined the cruise side, in 1989, most of the people who came on board the ships had probably never been in a casino in their life. If you think back to then, there were in America only casinos in Nevada and Atlantic City, so people who came on were uneducated in gaming and played in an uneducated fashion. They made decisions on Blackjack which would make more money for the casino. People are now very savvy about casinos. They not only know the games better, they know what slot machines they like and know the hold percentages on them. You can see it on an Embarkation Day when they first see the casino after they board the ship, they go round and check exactly what’s there because they know what they want. Today’s casino guest is far more educated and far more demanding. Because the majority have a casino available to them within about two hours’ drive of where they live, they can take it or leave it on the ship, so we have to be that much more attractive from the point of view of our ambience and our guest service; our smiling staff are the best attribute we have. If you go to some of the big casinos you’ll notice that the staff sometimes appear to be totally disinterested. With us, if you’ve got a group of guests aboard for four, five, seven days, you want those guests to choose your room as a place to spend their time. We put a great deal of effort into our guest service. In fact, it says on our application that ‘talking to the guest on the game is not only permitted, it’s a requirement of your position’. We also have casino hosts whose job is purely to walk around and interact with the guests, to give lessons, run tournaments, keep an eye out for the guest who looks confused or needs an explanation or help.

CI: How do you find staff, or do they find you?

RD: We have an internet recruitment site which we’ve had for about eight years – www.oceancasinojobs.com – and people from all over the world find that. We get in the region of 150 applications per week. Of course, there’s always a large number of people who apply who don’t have the background or the experience that you’re looking for. They think working on a cruise ship is a very easy job, but in fact it’s a very difficult job with long hours. The income is reasonable but it’s not stupendous. The problem on a cruise ship is you’ll always be a crew member and you have controls on your life from the point of view of always being ready to perform emergency duties if required. It’s not like the average casino where after your shift you go home and that’s it; you have no more responsibilities until you return to work.

CI: Do cruise ship casino workers face different challenges to their land-based colleagues?

RD: Tremendously. A land-based casino worker is generally going to work in their home town environment – they don’t change their base of operations. For working on a cruise ship, it virtually always involves traveling a great distance. Once you’re employed by a cruise ship, you are the responsibility of the cruise line, so there’s a pretty thorough medical to pass before you can get on a ship. When you get to a ship, you are first of all in a very strange environment from the point of view of finding your way around. In our casino department, we have around 55 different nationalities, and we hire from all over the world. You’ll be sharing a cabin, and immediately have to go through quite intensive safety training in your very first days on board to educate you about all the aspects of your responsibilities as a crew member as opposed to your responsibilities as a casino staff member. You have to know what the emergency signals are, exactly where you go when that signal sounds and what duties you carry out at that location. All of these make that initial entry into life on board very tiring. The one thing that’s in short supply on a ship is crew cabins. It’s not like you can send somebody on board and say ‘You take the first week off work and learn all your safety lessons’. There is a need to fasttrack everyone through safety training at the same time as performing their duties as one of the casino staff. Having said that, it’s a remarkable environment for friendliness, for working as a team with people from all over the world and the relationship they develop in our casinos with our guests is wonderful. If you go to one of the casino message boards like Gaming Floor you will soon see what a long standing bond has developed between cruise ship casino staff.

CI: So what qualities do you look for in these staff?

RD: I still go out and interview and table test all over the world. I put the staff member applying behind a Blackjack table and ask myself the question, ‘Will our guest enjoy this experience?’, because I’m not looking for the fastest dealer or the most clean-cut, I’m looking for personality. I need the guest to come out of dinner and say ‘Let’s go back and play at Sarah’s table, we had such a lot of fun there last night.’ That’s what we’re trying to do. In England you have a casino academy that’s just opened up at Blackpool and the Fylde College. We interviewed there in the spring , and we hope to be back there again this summer looking for a lot more young at heart casino workers with attitude and personality to light up our casinos.

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