For Jason Liberty, Chairman and CEO of Royal Caribbean Group, the future of cruising isn’t just about building bigger ships. It’s about building a smarter ecosystem. In a recent interview, Liberty revealed how the company is leveraging artificial intelligence to transform its operations, moving from a transactional business model to one obsessed with a singular goal: turning a “vacation of a lifetime into a lifetime of vacations.” Liberty explained how he’s driving this: “We’re massive users of AI in a non-creepy way.”
Liberty said Royal Caribbean is deploying AI to streamline everything from pricing to food production. For instance, Royal Caribbean is close to reducing its food waste by 50% through predictive modeling. “Now we can predict how many hamburgers we should be producing every 15 minutes,” he said, describing the company as a “petri dish” for practical technology use cases.
Such moves are paying off as Royal Caribbean stock is up 15% over the last month on the back of bumper earnings of $17.5 billion last year. Liberty told investors that 2026 is off to a “great start” with trips already two-thirds booked for the year.
Royal Caribbean is outperforming its peers in one of the hottest sectors of the tourism industry, Liberty said, in part because of its focus on upmarket cruise experiences on mega ships and private island clubs like CocoCay in the Bahamas and Haiti’s Labadee.
But leveraging technology is also key. Liberty told Fortune that technology is serving a broader purpose than just kitchen efficiency, playing a major role in driving strong results. The company manages 15 million price points every day—90% of which are now automated—to maximize revenue while offering customers personalized experiences. This allows the retention of Royal Caribbean workers in higher-value roles, he explained.
“By the way,” Liberty said, “it’s not that we we’ve eliminated pricing people. We’ve just moved those pricing people to higher-purpose roles inside of pricing.” For instance, they are equipped with demographic data to put options in front of customers, “getting you to be able to have that extra restaurant spend with us or shore excursion because you didn’t really know about it. It’s a way to get more of the wallet, but in reality, we’re giving that guest more experiences that they may not have known about.”
Competing with Taylor Swift
This high-tech pivot supports a fundamental shift in how Royal Caribbean views its competition. Liberty said the company stopped viewing other cruise lines as their primary rivals years ago. Instead, they look landward.
“The genesis of it was, how do we close the gap to Orlando? How do we close the gap to Vegas?” Liberty explained. Over the past year, he added, the company wasn’t just competing with theme parks, but with pop culture phenomenons. “We were competing with Taylor Swift,” he said, noting that families with disposable income often have to choose between a $6,000 concert experience or a week-long family cruise.
The competition has evolved beyond geography to the “experience economy” itself, so beloved by millennials, who Liberty noted now comprise the majority of Royal Caribbean customers. “They like to take lots of vacation experiences … what we’re seeing is that the millennials and younger are spending more and more time on vacation, experiences, remote work,” and they’re willing to spend the equivalent of a weeklong vacation on a three- or four-day experience if its a good enough experience. “They’re willing to do that more more frequently, as long as you’re delivering the experience that they want.”
To win that battle, Liberty observes that consumers are “trading less stuff for more experiences”. They are looking for a narrative to share on social media—creating “FOMO” (fear of missing out) among friends.
The Lifetime Strategy
To capture this demand, Royal Caribbean is restructuring its portfolio to keep guests within its ecosystem forever. The “lifetime of vacations” strategy is designed to migrate customers across the company’s brands as their demographics and bank accounts change.
A family might start on a Royal Caribbean “Icon” class ship, move to Celebrity for a premium experience, upgrade to Silversea for ultra-luxury, and eventually take an expedition cruise to Antarctica or the Galapagos.
This lifecycle approach is being fueled by what Liberty calls “active wealth transfer.” Rather than waiting for inheritance, grandparents are spending their money now to bring multi-generational families on cruises. “There’s almost nothing that the grandparents now won’t spend on their grandchildren,” Liberty observed, adding that it is common to see large family groups traveling on a single credit card.
By combining these demographic shifts with hyper-efficient, AI-driven operations, Royal Caribbean aims to secure trust—a metric Liberty values above almost all others.
“When you think about trust with a customer,” Liberty said, “they don’t think twice about making sure that they come back to you”.
Additional reporting contributed by Nick Lichtenberg
