Landing a project that can be identified as a company’s largest fixed-price contract in its long history is reason enough to celebrate, but when it’s with a corporation intimately familiar with your work and company values, that validates an organization’s processes from sales and engineering to manufacturing, installation, and service.
This win for the company is the culmination of an almost 20-year relationship designing and building entertainment stage lift systems for Royal Caribbean International. With five AquaTheatre stages installed across the cruise line’s Oasis class ships and years of planned maintenance behind them, Handling Specialty is partnering again with Royal Caribbean on their new Icon class.
“This project began 2.5 years ago with technical sales and conceptual engineering leading the charge to win this prestigious venture,” says Tom Beach, President of Handling Specialty and the lead sales associate on this project. “We cherish our relationship with Royal Caribbean, and with a revenue stream via new builds, service, and dry dock overhauls that will last over 10-plus years, we understand what it takes to keep our customers happy.”
The Icon class ships, starting with Icon of the Seas, introduced new concepts alongside familiar spaces such as the AquaTheatre, which has been entertaining guests across the cruise line’s five Oasis class ships for over a decade. These theatres excite show-goers with high diving, acrobatics, and dance routines designed to splash around on the three underwater stage lifts. Each lift moves independently from one another, creating a stage that seemingly disappears one moment and reappears the next. The choreography is created, and the stages are programmed to facilitate the actors and athletes as they seamlessly move through their dynamic shows.
A similar design will entertain vacationers on Icon as the underwater stage systems perform new and inventive shows. As with any heavy, custom machinery, safety measures are paramount when developing equipment designed to interact with people. This sort of precautionary engineering developed over many years, designing and building stage lift systems for multiple shows all over the world, is another reason Royal Caribbean trusts Handling Specialty’s engineering prowess.
“Experience goes a long way in winning a project as large as this,” Beach goes on to say. “Deploying professionals and skilled technicians to Finland to install our stage lifts will be a challenge, but we’ve completed similar scenarios many times before.”
In March of 2021, Handling Specialty sent a team of technicians to Barbados, where they quarantined on the Allure of the Seas for 14 days to perform planned maintenance on the ship’s AquaTheatre. This same group of people went on to Spain, where they completed the same work on Harmony of the Seas. Freighting the parts and flying the people to these locations during a pandemic, and successfully completing the work ahead of schedule is another nod to Handling Specialty’s abilities to organize massive projects and perform the work without interruption. It also speaks to the quality of the people working at Handling Specialty and the lengths they will go to to see a job through.
With more class ships in the queue to be constructed, the financial impact on the Niagara-based company is a welcome one. Entertainment industry builds have been scarce through the pandemic and to come out the other end with a project of this size is a boost to company morale and another nod to Handling Specialty’s impressive track record designing and building stage lift systems for the entertainment industry.
Since 1963, Handling Specialty has been exclusively dedicated to the custom design and manufacture of your material handling systems & equipment for demanding applications. We are the premier source for made-to-order lifting, tilting, rotating, and traversing equipment for clients seeking innovative solutions, exceptional professional support, world-class credentials, and unmatched experience.
