Celebrity Cruises: We'll have open dinner seating on ships by September


PAPENBURG, Germany -- It's official: Celebrity Cruises will offer passengers the option of open seating in the main dining rooms of its ships by the beginning of fall.

Top Celebrity executives told cruise writers touring the soon-to-launch Celebrity Equinox in Germany this weekend the line will roll out the option across the fleet in September.

Word of what the line is calling Celebrity Select Dining first leaked out last month, but Celebrity hadn't said when it planned to roll out the concept. The offering will be in addition to -- not a replacement for -- traditional assigned early and late seating on the line's vessels. Passengers will be able to choose which type of seating they want -- open or traditional -- at the time they book their cruise.

Celebrity is one of the last major lines to add an open seating option in its main dining rooms, and the line is doing it a bit differently than its competitors. Specifically, Celebrity is in the process of setting up a reservation system that will allow passengers on the open-seating plan to book tables for different times each night ahead of time.

The system would allow passengers to make a reservation for each night of their voyage either before they board the ship or after they get onboard.
"The dining experience is paramount to the Celebrity experience, (and) we felt a large percentage of our guests would say (they) would like open seating, but (they) would like to choose (their) time," Lutoff-Perlo explained during a press conference on the new Equinox.

Lutoff-Perlo says the reservation system would solve one of the biggest problems with open seating encountered by other lines: The tendency for passengers on open seating to arrive in unmanageable clumps -- forcing some to wait for a table. Lutoff-Perlo says the line wants to avoid situations where passengers "have to wait for a half hour for a table because (they) came when everyone else did."

The reservation system, she says, allows passengers on the open-seating plan to vary the time they eat dinner from night to night but still know they have a table waiting for them when they head to dinner.

Lutoff-Perlo says surveys of Celebrity passengers fleetwide showed that about 50% wanted the open-seating option. Notably, though, the percentage was lower among passengers sailing on the line's newest ship, the seven-month-old Solstice. Lutoff-Perlo says that's likely because the 2,850-passenger Solstice already has a lot of dining flexibilty thanks to its many alternative restaurants.

One potential downside to the open seating plan: The line says it can't guarantee that passengers on the plan who make reservations for specific times in the dining room will eat alone. Two sets of couples with the same reservation time, for instance, could be paired together at a table for four if all the tables for two already are taken.

"There are limited tables for two, so (guaranteed tables for two on open seating) is not something that were going to be able to accommodate," Celebrity CEO Dan Hanrahan noted.

That said, Hanrahan and Lutoff-Perlo say they've studied the idea of open seating for a long time and think they have a formula that works out a lot of the kinks found with open seating on other lines.

"We've watched eveybody go before us, including our sister brands," notes Lutoff-Perlo. "We've done a lot of research."

Celebrity Cruises: We'll have open dinner seating on ships by September - Crui

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