Royal Caribbean will be a featured speaker at  the Social Networking Conference and Strategic Communications Conference taking place on June 23-24, 2011 at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.

Royal Caribbean's Global Corporate Communications Manager, Cynthia Martinez, will be on hand at the conference to cover the topic of crisis management with social media.  Martinez will use the example of the earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath to discuss how Royal Caribbean leveraged their website, blog, Facebook, and Twitter to keep the media and general public informed.  

She will discuss how these social media tools helped mitigate some of the negative press Royal Caribbean received and how they helped prevent long-term damage to the cruise's brand.

A number of Royal Caribbean employees in the Eugene, Oregon area decided to give back to their local community when about 60 Royal Caribbean employees teamed up with St. Vincent de Paul to clean up some affordable housing complexes.

The group split up into teams and landscaped as well as painted three different sites in the Eugene area.

The effort was part of Royal Caribbean's annual corporate volunteer day that's goal is to help the community around them.

Royal Caribbean has a a 200000-square-foot national customer service center in the Eugene-Springfield, Oregon area that opened in 2005.

Earlier this week an oil tank exploded right next to Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas.  One of the passengers aboard Independence of the Seas shared this first-hand report with The Telegraph.

We were in our cabin when we heard a loud bang. At first we presumed it was the anchor – the ship was due to leave the port at Gibraltar, so we thought it was setting sail a little earlier than scheduled.

Within minutes, the captain made an announcement, ordering everyone off the open decks and balconies, and sending a rapid response team up to deck 11 where the outdoor pools and bars were packed with young families making the most of the Gibraltar heat.

Just four minutes later, we slipped our moorings and the ship sailed, leaving the gangway and two passengers behind. Within minutes, the captain said it was safe to return to the open decks.

At dinner that night, the explosion was on everyone’s lips. “We thought it was a bomb,” one middle-aged passenger said. “American ship in a British port – quite an easy target.” 

Hurricane season in the Atlantic began this week and every year cruise passengers worry about how a hurricane could impact their cruise.  While there's the possibility that your itinerary may change, Royal Caribbean head Captain Bill Wright urges passengers not to worry.

"Keep in mind that hurricanes or storms are travelling at about six to 12 knots and today's modern ship cruises over 20 knots," he says.

"In a worst-case scenario, we can outrun the storm, although we very rarely have to do that. As soon as we see a storm could affect our routing or home port, we move into the situation room with the president and all the teams, as do all the major cruise lines.

"Here we determine whether we may have to skip a port, continue as usual or exchange a Western Caribbean cruise for an Eastern Caribbean cruise. Once this happens, it gets to be a bit of competition among the lines to see who can set up the new schedule the fastest, ensuring the best berth in the new ports."

Those are for en-route ports, but what happens if a hurricane's heading to your home port? Wright explains: "This probably is the most difficult time, as we have to worry about all passengers on the ship, plus those waiting for the ship. For example, if Fort Lauderdale is our base, we may have to move to Port Canaveral or stay an extra day at sea, necessitating a massive re-deployment of our passengers."

What about rough seas on the edge of the storms?

"Today's ships are computerstabilized, making us able to cope much better than we could some years ago," he says.

"The technology really showed us what it could do when we were ferrying Oasis of the Seas across the Atlantic with just crew and workers on board finishing the interior. We hit some major weather but (everyone) kept working through the storm."

iAfrica.com listed a top 10 list of the latest and greatest innovations at sea and not surprisingly, Royal Caribbean's innovations made a lot of the list.

• Size: The largest cruise ships ever constructed are now on active routes throughout the world including Royal Caribbean International’s world record holder, Allure of the Seas, a 1187ft behemoth capable of carrying more than 6000 passengers.
• Next-Gen Cinemas: With Hollywood’s latest blockbusters now being presented in 3D, cruise ship operators including Royal Caribbean have revamped onboard cinemas to deliver a seamless 3D experience.
• High-tech fun: Royal Caribbean passengers can show off their surfing skills at the Flowrider, a purpose built, man-made wave on its Oasis and Freedom class vessels.
• Onboard Shows: Licensed works of Andrew Lloyd Webber and critically acclaimed productions of Hairspray and Chicago have featured on P&O and Royal Caribbean liners.

Dates for the Beatles Tribute Cruise 2012 have been announced.  The cruise will be on Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas February 4-11, 2012.

The cruise will feature Beatles tribute band, "Revolution" and the date of the cruise is no coincidence.  It's set to coincide with the 48th Anniversary of The Beatles first U.S. Television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show back in 1964.

The cruise will also feature special guests

• LJ Juber (Wings band member)
• Mark Hudson (Producer for Ringo Starr)
• Tony Bramwell (Author of Beatles books)
• Tim Piper (John Lennon impressionist)
• Joe Johnson (Emcee)

The Telegraph listed the top 50 cruise excursions that "you would struggle to do alone or which could be difficult or expensive to organize".  Three from the list are offered by Royal Caribbean.

19. Horseback ride and swim, Jamaica
The fun starts after a rather tame ride, when you change into a swimming costume and remount the horse, now bareback, for the swim. The horses really do swim; you have to hang on to stop floating away. £68 for three and a half hours.

20. Amazing secret river, Cozumel
Join a guide for an exploration of a subterranean world filled with stalactites and stalagmites. You'll walk, wade or swim around the 600-metre route. £62 for eight hours. Minimum age six. 

46. Elephant safari ride, Bali
You'll be taken to the Elephant Safari Park at Taro for a ride through the forest on one of these gentle giants. The tour ends with a splash at the park's bathing lake. £84 for about seven and a half hours. 

Royal Caribbean Adam Goldstein outlined some new details about the new class of Royal Caribbean ships that is on order in a recent blog entry.  While Goldstein can't divulge details about the ship quite yet, he did clue us into the process they are engaged in that will bring Royal Caribbean its next new ships in about 3 years.

Royal Caribbean has a department that specializes in these new ship designs called "Fleet Design & Newbuild", although Goldstein notes that is more commonly referred to as simply "Newbuild".  Newbuild is also involved in ship upgrades, such as the one that is going on right now for Radiance of the Seas.

The new Project Sunshine class ship design is being headed up by Executive VP Harri Kulovaara and chief designer Kelly Gonzalez.

The design process involves the Operations, Marketing and Executive Steering committee divisions of Royal Caribbean.  The Executive Steering committee is made up of Adam Goldstein, Royal Caribbean Chairman Richard Fain and Harri Kulovaara.  They meet once a month for a day to go over "critical aspects of the project".  The executive steering  committee normally meet in Miami, but for the May meeting, they flew out to Germany to the Meyerwerft shipyard for a meeting there.

Goldstein reiterated that Project Sunshine should be ready sometime in 2014.

The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has been at the forefront of the field of telehealth solutions for many years.  They've been working on improving remote health screenings with the use of technology since the 1990s and they've been a partner with Royal Caribbean to help keep the Royal Caribbean work force healthy.

Royal Caribbean receives remote dermatology consultations from the University of Miami for consultations of its employees while they are on the cruise ships,  in both real time and with store-and-forward technology. Scott Simmons, director of telehealth for the University of Miami is excited about the possibilities,  “Dermatology is one that works really well with store-and-forward".

Royal Caribbean's ships have consumer-grade digital cameras along with encrypted software to ensure privacy and security for the patients.  To make this all work, the ships need Internet bandwidth of 384 kbps to 512 kbps to make the link between the ship and the university facility work correctly.  

With satellite internet onboard cruise ships already a costly and slow affair, Simmons thinks there's better tech coming to help, “The software-based videoconferencing systems are getting better".