In Qsine, the speciality restaurant on Celebrity Cruises' Celebrity Eclipse, you order your food on an iPad. And now the same touch-screen technology has moved in at Vintages, the classy wine bar on Royal Caribbean's new Allure of the Seas.
It's all clever stuff. They link an iPad to your on-board account as you arrive and away you go. There are 47 different wines to choose from, listed with notes from the winemakers, on-board sommeliers or both, so it saves having to train wine waiters, and you can have a glass, or half or whole bottle.
Your order goes through to your waiter's PDA and he or she serves the wine to the table - see, they can't manage without people completely, or at least not yet.
If you fancy some tapas-style nibbles, you also order them with the iPad. The one I saw wasn't fully set up on the food side but it showed three "packages", made up of things like salami, olives, garlic bread and prawns, that cost from $8 to $13.
The cheapest wine, by the way, is a very reasonable $28 a bottle, but they didn't tell me the most expensive (unlike on a paper menu I couldn't just scan the price list to find out!).
Frank Weber, in charge of food and beverages on Allure of the Seas, told me phase two of the iPad revolution will be to have a "wine assistant" who will suggest wines based on what you fancy, be it a dry red or a fruity white.
And then the long-term plan is to roll-out the iPads to other Royal Caribbean ships once they have had a chance to see it works.
Jane Archer
