Cruise Radio is brought to you by Ensuremytrip.com. Travel insurance done right from the people who know travel insurance. Find out more at Ensuremytrip.com.

You are listening to. Broadcasting from the Ensuremytrip.com mobile studios. This is Cruise Radio.

Hey, what's up? My name is Doug Parker.

Thank you so much for making Cruise Radio a part of your daily lineup.

We surely couldn't be here without you.

Coming up a little later on in the program, we'll talk to Barry Vodran and get a cruise ship review of the Queen Mary 2, a transatlantic Barry did recently going from New York City to South Hampton, so I'm looking forward to that. But first, I had an interview a few weeks ago to interview the head meter D for Carnival Cruise Lines, the singing Mater D, Ken Byrne, and he joins me right now. Ken, welcome the cruise radio, my friend. Thank you very much, Douglas. It's a pleasure to be here with you all, and on the crossing, of course. I got to say, before we start the interview, dude, you are a complete rock star on this cruise ship. You can't go anywhere without people knowing who you are or coming up to you. Plus, on top of that, you did two sold-out performances, Sinatra performances in the Liquid Lounge, standing room only. I was like jockeying to try to even get a picture of you because there were so many people on the staircase. Was that a qualifier when you got hired here at Carnival? You have to sing. No, not really. It happened in 1997 on the Carnival Triumph when some guests one evening asked me to sing a song for their 60th anniversary

and it all started from that. A waiter after dinner asked me to, you know, put tracks to my songs

and I use it as a tool. When I sing in the restaurant, the waiters, now they have three minutes before

they do their little dance routine. However, the two shows on the crossing, it's the first time I've

ever done a live concert on a carniviship, and I'm still, I'm still blown away by the response.

I couldn't get over the amount of people that were there.

And, of course, the standing ovations. And I'm actually very happy that I've done it myself. And I'm very happy that I've done it for the guests. It was actually great fun. You may have raised the bar for yourself now, because now, besides your major D-D We usually want you to do a couple of performances per selling.

Yeah, that's for sure.

And I actually hope they do ask me because I really enjoyed that, you know, and I've been trying to do it for many years, you know, but because it's not part of my job description, I guess there was a barrier always there between food and beverage and entertainment, you know. Right. And the accent, Scotland, Ireland? from Dublin Ireland. Yeah, yeah. And give us a little bit of background about yourself. We want to kind of get to know you.

Yeah, well, Ireland. From Dublin, Ireland, yeah, yeah. And give us a little bit of background about yourself.

We want to kind of get to know you.

Yeah, well, it started in this industry in 1978, way back in Cunard as a young busboy. Busboy Way, they spent a couple of years with Coonard. They spent many years with Royal Caribbean, and I've been over 20 years with Carnival Cruise Lines. Wow. Mainly being involved with all their new ship builds.

This is my 25th Transatlantic Crossing.

Okay.

So 24 new ships plus the sunshine twice, because I was here on the Destiny and 96. So it's 25 new ships I've been on for Carnival Cruise Lines. And of course, you know, cruising and dining trends have changed over the years, you know, and we just adapt the change and go with the flow and try and keep our guests coming back and happy, you know? What are some of the duties as a Mater D on board a cruise ship? Well, you're responsible for the entire restaurant service, Lido Deck service, which is the open-sitting buffet service. You oversee your room service and all your staff dining areas. And of course, guest reservations, which is assigning all of our guests to either regular dining or open sitting, YTD, your time dining. You've always got your Bon Voyage deliveries with your gifts that are sent on board to be delivered on vacation day. And you've got all your daily duties, such as schedules, safeties, boat drills, meetings, and all that type of things. So there's a huge responsibility there, you know? Yeah, you definitely have a full plate there. Then how many people are on your team? I've got 138 wait staff between both dynar rooms at the moment, which is around the budget. And then you've got 45 assistant waiters working throughout the restaurant, the staff dine rooms, the bistro the room service. And they qualify then and we move them into the dining rooms as they progress, you know. How different is it working at sea as a mater-D versus working on land, like in a restaurant? That's totally different. You know, you've got to love this business to do it. You know, in Hotel Shoreside, you know, you work the average 40, 50 years a week. We work approximately between 70, 72 hours a week, you know, if not more at times, it depends on the workload. But mainly, you work every dinner for your entire contract of six months. You would have additional lunches off, pending on the port of call you're in. And you work the majority of every breakfast. So you're probably here breakfast, lunch and dinner, see days and breakfast dinner on port days. So even a big dog like yourself, and you're actually working seven days a week every single seating? That's for sure, yeah. You work seven days a week, and know, you become programmed to the system, you know, you get used to it. And it's fine, you know. I don't mind it. I still love it, you know, I've been doing it for over 30 years and, you know, every cruise is not the same, so it's always different, you know. So you get different people, there's always different stories and different things to talk about and I will always try my best to get to every table no matter what it is. Sometimes it's difficult and sometimes it might take me three or four days to get to every table because there's a lot of tables in the restaurant, right? A ship is like basically a floating small city. Do you ever find it challenging? Yeah, it's always challenging. There's always something challenging. You've got to think of it between guests and crew with the ship of this capacity. You have over 4,000000 and a half thousand people, which is probably larger than some small towns, you know. So there are challenging times, you know, but we do our best to always be on top of the action and we do our best to make it good for our guests, you know?

When you're not working on a cruise ship, where can we find you? Well, I certainly don't go on a cruise, so you're right. Yeah, yeah. Nine times out of ten, I'm back in Dublin Ireland for two months on my vacation over there. Lately, I've been traveling a little bit to do with music. I'm trying to look at a little bit of music. hopefully in the next year or two

I can do something

...