With Fidelio systems you gain total financial control onboard,” If W said Tony Heuer, president of Fidelio Cruise Software. “With a total cashless system, all revenues are accounted for,” he added.

But Fidelio offers more than financial control: the company’s core system, the Cruise Property Management System (PMS), is an integrated system that covers all aspects of the management of the hotel department onboard, including passenger and crew embarkation and disembarkation.

In addition, cruise lines can select modules, which are also integrated with the core PMS, meaning that the system pulls information from the central database and updates all records.

The gangway security module tracks every time a passenger or crewmember comes onboard or disembarks. That person’s record is updated in real time status so the ship always knows who went ashore, when, and whether or not they came back.

The cashless point of sale system posts transactions immediately to the passenger or crew record from shops, bars or shore excursions.

Fidelio presently offers 20 modules, according to Heuer. Among the latest modules is the FC Shore Excursion kiosk, which allows passengers to book their own excursions. Alternatively, on some ships, passengers can also book excursions using the computers in the Internet Cafe. Thus, they avoid the lines that tend to form at the excursion desk at the beginning of the cruise and can book at their leisure. The bookings are made in real-time and allow the cruise line a better opportunity to fill all of its excursions.

Integration

Systems integration is the key to efficient ship operations, according to Heuer, who said that Star Cruises is able to embark 2,800 passengers in less than three hours with no lines, with their fully integrated shoreside and shipboard systems.
Fidelio’s shore excursion kiosk where passengers can book their own excursions 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Fidelio Cruise, which is a subsidiary of Micros Systems (NASDAQ), was founded in 1995, when it started the de-velopment of the PMS software that was first installed on the Aida (now Aidacara) in 1996.

Fidelio’s systems have since been installed aboard the ships of Disney Cruise Line, Festival Cruises, Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines, Norwegian Cruise Line, Radisson Seven Seas Cruises and Star Cruises, among others.

This past spring, Fidelio was contracted by Holland America Line for all its Vista-class vessels, which will have several of the modules installed, including shore excursions, remote check-in (for hotel check-in), hotel maintenance, marketing and promotions, dining reservations, and passenger survey analysis.

Customized Solutions

Among the more customized systems is the installation aboard The World of Residensea. The ship has three categories of guests: owners, guests of owners occupying owners’ apartments, and regular passengers who book a suite for a cruise.

Owners are billed monthly. Guests of owners and regular passengers are billed at the end of their cruise. Owners and guests of owners are charged for food consumed onboard whereas regular passengers are not (their food is included in the cruise fare).
Some of the apartments onboard also have many phone lines and some of the owners want to be able to call in when not onboard to collect their voice mail, explained Heuer. Therefore the phone lines cannot be deactivated, which is normally done when a guest has checked out and leaves the ship. Thus, modifications had to be made to the ship’s telephone system to accommodate these needs.

The World also features a more discreet identification card with a chip that does not have to be swiped when passengers or crew come and go, but is instead activated by a detector. If a crew member or passenger does not carry a valid card, a warning signal will alert the gangway security immediately. The card is also the passenger key card and onboard charge card.

Global

While Fidelio Cruise is headquartered in Hamburg, the company has offices in Ft. Lauderdale with a staff of 11 that provides sales and service support; and offices in Vancouver, Piraeus and Kuala Lumpur.

The software must be rock-solid. “If a hotel has a problem, it is easy to install a bug-fix, but on a ship in the middle of the ocean, it is a different story. Our focus has been on making our software rock-solid and bug-free since day one.”
Where to from here?

“The next big challenge is the integration of onboard systems with shoreside systems to give the head office financial control of the onboard operation,” said Heuer.