Tablets

[Catalina56]

Are all cruise lines using tablets to take your dinner order as done on the Koningsdam. If you order off the menu, they don't know how to handle it. It was very disconcerting to see all the maitre'ds running around with laptops on the November 18, 2017 sailing

 

catalina56

[DisneyDatknee]

I did not have my order taken on a tablet my most recent cruise on Royal Caribbean in January.

[Crew News]

I asked about the tablets being used by the Wine Stewards and not the MDR waiters on the Zuiderdam, Dec 2016. The issue was bandwidth with so many tablets in use at the same time and place. I was told that tablets are the future of MDR order taking once the glitches are overcome.

[GUT2407]

Are all cruise lines using tablets to take your dinner order as done on the Koningsdam. If you order off the menu, they don't know how to handle it. It was very disconcerting to see all the maitre'ds running around with laptops on the November 18, 2017 sailing

 

catalina56

 

 

Not on Princess or Cunard.

 

Did you time travel

[madda]

We recently did a three night food and wine cruise on the P&O Pacific Eden and in the three specialty restaurants we went to, they were using tablets to take orders, and am sorry to say that we were given incorrect meals at each restaurant.

[Essiesmom]

Not on Carnival or MSC. EM

[bUU]

Hmmm... Transportation time between guest and POS unit probably limits how many tables a server can serve by at least one, and that probably accounts for the need for at least one if not more servers or dining room. Expanding the crew network's bandwidth and the tablets to directly enter orders could break even in weeks. Makes sense. And you eliminate transcription error as well.

 

This message may have been entered using voice recognition. Please excuse any typos.

[iflyrc5]

We did not have tablets in the MDR on the Maasdam in fall of 2016 or the Rotterdam in Feb 2017.

[bnickle]

It wouldn't surprise me if that procedure is put into place eventually. Princess Cruise Line is getting ready to debut their "Ocean Medallion" on three of it's ships within the calendar year. While, so far, you can't order food in the dining room with it, you can order food and drink while, for example, lounging by the pool, or sitting somewhere on the ship other than your room. I think we'll see more and more digitally handled on most cruise lines over the next few years, but they are going to have to seriously upgrade their wifi systems for that to work.

[bUU]

It wouldn't surprise me if that procedure is put into place eventually. Princess Cruise Line is getting ready to debut their "Ocean Medallion" on three of it's ships within the calendar year. While, so far, you can't order food in the dining room with it, you can order food and drink while, for example, lounging by the pool, or sitting somewhere on the ship other than your room. I think we'll see more and more digitally handled on most cruise lines over the next few years, but they are going to have to seriously upgrade their wifi systems for that to work.

Absolutely. And we can look to land resorts for a preview of what's to come at sea. Disney World is about to open a new casual eatery where you can order what you want on your tablet, through their app anytime before you wish your order to be filled, and then press a button when you arrive at the venue and your order will be made fresh. (So, of course, most people will press the "I'm here!" button about ten minutes prior to arrival at the eatery, eh? So not only will we see service providers using digital tools more, but they'll open their systems up to being accessed directly from patron's digital tools.

[TheEmerson]

At the end of the day, all food orders in the MDR get entered into the Restaurant Management Software. Hand written tickets are transposed into the RMS for accounting and order processing. The limits seen today is there are limited fixed terminals located in the MDR and just inside the doors so waiters must copy down orders on paper then some times wait for a terminal to open to enter again. This causes a noticeable service delay. The march of technology to move to order entry tablets for the waiters is a natural progression in the restaurant industry. Large installations will have their growing pains. At least HAL has moved the Wine/Beverage waiters to using tablets as the first step to iron out the kinks before food ordering.

[POA1]

Our waiter and wine steward both used tablets on the Eurodam. The tablet ordering and the wine runners made for stellar (seriously) wine service. We had the Elite Beverage Package and typically ordered 3 glasses of wine per meal, 2 still and one sparkling.

 

We placed "special orders" on several occasions and never had any problems. My guess is that it's a matter of training and skill. After all, your servers used to go punch your orders into a terminal anyway. This removes the extra step of writing things down to rekey them later.

[bUU]

At the end of the day, all food orders in the MDR get entered into the Restaurant Management Software.

I suspect that they're capitalizing on this to get real time projections of ship's stores based on inventory in and orders out. Not 100% accurate, but a decent way of applying prudent stewardship.

[sppunk]

We had no issues special ordering via tablets in the dining room on our Koningsdam cruise on Nov 23, 2017. No issues with bar stewards either.

 

The waiters and managers love them. The bar staff even moreso.

[avian777]

hmmmmmmmmmmm... I must be missing something here. Why would anyone care if the HAL MDR waiters are taking her/his order on a Big Chief or TOPS or Mead or Top Flight or any other brand of writing tablet???

[ppmanusa]

Didn't see tablet use on RCL Allure or Princess Regal

 

Only ate at Koningsdam MDR once & don't recall how the order was taken.

 

I do have to say the technology worked great with the beverage servers.Sometimes we'd order a couple drinks at billboard and go into the theater or at the aft pool bar. They'd say go have a seat somewhere someone will bring it out. After a while amazed how they found us so easily on the crowded decks and dark theater the bartender said they use a facial recognition software.

 

 

[Sequim88]

Tablets for communicating the order to the kitchen I would suspect will come at the cost of a trade-off with flexibility in ordering. Unless they are programmed to accommodate special orders there would be an opportunity to mess up an order OR just not allow it. My wife often orders a couple appetizers as her entire meal. Cruise dinning has always had a reputation of granting pretty much whatever you desire from the menu and I am afraid that will be reduced by the rigidity of the systems. Sort of takes some of the "human touch" out of the MDR experience.

 

At least HAL has moved the Wine/Beverage waiters to using tablets as the first step to iron out the kinks before food ordering

 

Beverages would be a lot easier since a glass of wine is a glass of wine and most drinks are pretty set but there would still be exceptions to allow for such as "extra spicy" Bloody Marys. Having worked with manufacturing systems for many years I know that product configurator software can be a real bear to set up and handle all the exceptions correctly.

[kazu]

Tablets for communicating the order to the kitchen I would suspect will come at the cost of a trade-off with flexibility in ordering. Unless they are programmed to accommodate special orders there would be an opportunity to mess up an order OR just not allow it. My wife often orders a couple appetizers as her entire meal. Cruise dinning has always had a reputation of granting pretty much whatever you desire from the menu and I am afraid that will be reduced by the rigidity of the systems. Sort of takes some of the "human touch" out of the MDR experience.

 

 

 

Beverages would be a lot easier since a glass of wine is a glass of wine and most drinks are pretty set but there would still be exceptions to allow for such as "extra spicy" Bloody Marys. Having worked with manufacturing systems for many years I know that product configurator software can be a real bear to set up and handle all the exceptions correctly.

 

We had tablets for MDR ordering on the Westerdam last year. I saw no differnce in flexibility or any such issues.

 

Service was good on board as was the food and any requests we made were happily attended to without issue. :)

[bUU]

Tablets for communicating the order to the kitchen I would suspect will come at the cost of a trade-off with flexibility in ordering. Unless they are programmed to accommodate special orders there would be an opportunity to mess up an order OR just not allow it.

According to what was shared with us, above, that's not the case: These electronic systems have been the one and only way to communicate orders to the kitchen for a while now. All that is changing is switching from using POS equipment scattered around the dining room to using a mobile device. There apparently hasn't been handwritten communication with the kitchen for a while. And that's consistent with what we have seen in similarly large restaurant operations on land for at least the last twenty years.

 

Sort of takes some of the "human touch" out of the MDR experience.

Not at all. You're still telling a human being what you want, just like before. Effectively nothing else changes, from what was relayed earlier.

 

By the same token, I related indications that at least on land that human touch is being reduced. It is, of course, the most expensive way to communicate what a patron wants, in the long-run. You can expect eventually it'll go away throughout the mass market, and become specifically a luxury amenity.