Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings (NCLH) has made sweeping changes to turnaround day stateroom cleaning for its Norwegian Cruise Line brand, enabling it to reduce cabin steward headhunt by 500 crew members across its fleet while maintaining and even increasing guest satisfaction scores, according to Patrik Dahlgren, executive vice president vessel operations.

The initiative is part of NCLH’s new transformation office, which has been busy looking at every aspect of the company.

For the cabin cleaning initiative, Dahlgren said they looked at how the cabin stewards set up and cleaned cabins on turnaround days.

“We did a time and motion study,” he said, speaking at the company’s investor day event in New York City earlier this week. “It outlined all the different steps the cabin steward had to take, in and out of the cabin, in order to set up and clean the cabin.”

Dahlgren said it was a wasteful process, with cabin stewards going back and forth to the main laundry area, which required significant transit time.

“Each cabin steward had to do this same over and over again. With our new process, we have significantly less steps for the cabin stewards to set up the cabin,” he said, noting cross-utilization with our departments that had available manpower on turn days.

“We had the same scores from guest, or higher, through the entire change. We also managed to reduce the headcount for the Norwegian brand for these cabin stewards by 500 people.”

Dahlgren called it a win-win, and said that cabin stewards also had more time to interact with guests, providing service and answering questions.