Welcome to the Royal Caribbean Blog podcast, a week of look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host, Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 382.

There is nothing quite like the oasis class ships that Royal Caribbean has, but coming up with a game changer like an oasis class ship is no simple task.

So many of the innovations that we take for granted today were classic cases of trial and error, including the Central Park neighborhood.

Today, we'll hear how Royal Caribbean came up with the concept for Central Park and how it almost didn't work at all.

Here we go.

I love hearing how Royal Caribbean works behind the scenes because I think most people miss out on just how much hard work goes into designing a new cruise ship.

Cruise ships are not ordered off a catalog by any means, and they're as intricate to design as any building on land with a lot more considerations and hurdles to overcome.

In today's Wayback Machine, we're going to head back to

the mid-2000s when Royal Caribbean was designing the Oasis class ships. Kelly Gonzalez is

Royal Caribbean Senior Vice President of Architectural Design, New Build, and Innovation, and she

recently shared the story behind Central Park during a webinar with travel agents. I thought it was

such a cool story that I

wanted to share it with all of you. It's incredible to think that Central Park almost never happened

because of the engineering barriers that Kelly's team ran into. I hope you enjoy this story as

much as I did. It's really my pleasure to be here today. And of course, there's not another topic

in the world that I enjoy

talking about as much as the design of our ships. So it's something that I've been very close to

over the last 22 years that I've been with the company. And I, of course, I work with all of the

brands with the corporation, but my first brand and my dearest brand is Royal Caribbean International,

and it's the brand that I know best and I've known for the longest.

So we'll go, I can speak first to the very first slide, and to really start the story next,

...