Royal Caribbean waiters to serve alcohol

Royal Caribbean International is making a change in its dining room service that will allow waiters to take orders for alcoholic beverages. Until now, bar servers roam the dining rooms, averaging about one bar server per 150 guests. Royal Caribbean President and CEO Adam Goldstein wrote in his blog that allowing waiters to take drink orders would reduce that ratio to one server per 24 guests. He said the change would take place fleetwide by the end of August.

“We are confident from our testing of this change that our wait staff will greatly improve the flow and timeliness of beverage service during the dining experience,” Goldstein wrote. “This program further increases guest satisfaction by enabling the waiter to place all cocktail and wine orders on one check. As with many changes, this initiative requires support and training that takes time, and there will be inevitable hiccups. We are implementing a core competency wine and sprits training program and ensuring it is available to all restaurant crew via the Internet. The training encompasses Gold Anchor Standards developed for this initiative. After we overcome the initial learning curve and culture change, we believe this new approach will boost guest satisfaction.” For more information, visit www.nationofwhynot.com/blog.