What I'll remember about meeting Frank Del Rio on the Prima

One of my favorite pastimes while sailing on the Norwegian Prima during its inaugural cruise out of Iceland last summer was watching an entourage of executives and designers follow Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings CEO Frank Del Rio around the ship as he critiqued it.

Whether it was the amount of art on the walls, the storage space in the bathrooms or the look of the aft lounge area, Del Rio and his team got around. Dressed in a white polo shirt, shorts and black loafers, he stopped to chat with me. He told me he wanted to figure out everything they got wrong or wanted to fix.

I asked what he was most excited about changing, and he said it was the drawers in the cabins. Sea trials revealed the ship could handle the extra weight of more drawers in the ship’s 1,600 cabins, he told me. (Although I hadn’t thought of it at the time, I might have suggested regulating the speed of the slide.)

Del Rio is a longtime cruise executive who is credited as a trailblazer, who carved out the upper-premium market and built Oceania Cruises to fit into it. Later, he added Regent Seven Seas Cruises to his purview when that luxury line was sold by Carlson Cos. to private equity firm Apollo, thereby creating Prestige Cruise Holdings. Later still, he became CEO of the combined Norwegian-Regent-Oceania cruise company.

But it was the attention to detail that I saw on from him on the Prima that stuck with me. 

By the time NCL’s second Prima-class ship, the Norwegian Viva, comes out late this summer, he will no longer be CEO. NCLH said Monday that Del Rio would retire on June 30, although he will continue to work with the company as a consultant through 2025.

Del Rio’s fingerprints are not only on recent ships from NCL, Oceania and Regent, but the people who are moving into the top roles after him. Harry Sommer, who has worked with Del Rio for decades, will take his place at the helm of NCLH. His son, Frank A. Del Rio, is now leading the line his father founded.

“A lot of the management team are people who have worked with Frank for years. These are Frank’s people,” Anthony Hamawy, president of Cruise.com, told me.

Del Rio has one more inaugural to go before stepping down. The Oceania Vista will sail a christening cruise out of Rome on May 6. I’ll be there, and I hope to spot him and his entourage roaming the ship, again. 

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