Celebrity Cruises’ newest ship ‘Celebrity Edge’ was named by the Pakistani activist and youngest Nobel Prize laureate, Malala Yousafzai, in a ceremony held Tuesday in Florida. Celebrity Edge is the company’s first new ship in six years and first new ship series in more than a decade. The ship’s highlight is that it has set a landmark with the major involvement of women in its development and the appointment of female crew in several key positions onboard.
- To begin with, the company, Celebrity Cruises, is run by Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, the first and only woman to lead one of Royal Caribbean’s cruise line brands, as well as the first and only female CEO of a cruise line listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Mrs. Lutoff-Perlo, appointed as a CEO in December 2014, has been intensively engaged in the fight for gender diversity and the encouragement of women ‘as new leaders of the world’.
- One of her first moves as a newly-appointed CEO was to hire the first American woman captain of a cruise ship, the Celebrity Summit, challenging leadership to raise the men/women ratio onboard. Celebrity has now a record three female captains on its ships. The third female Captain, Kate McCue, will take the helm on Celebrity Edge from 2019.
- Nicholine Tifuh Azirh will be on the ship’s bridge, as the first woman from Ghana to work on the bridge of a cruise ship, as part of a partnership with the Regional Maritime University in Ghana.
- Apart from the CEO, the Captain, deck crew and the godmother, women account for an impressive 37% of the guest-facing crew onboard the Celebrity Edge, according to Forbes.
- Meanwhile, the ship’s interior design has resulted from the work of women designers Kelly Hoppen and Patricia Urquiola.
Last but not least, Yousafzai, who is now a college student at Oxford University, is the inspirational co-founder of Malala Fund, which advocates for a world where every girl can learn and lead by investing in local education activists, holding global leaders accountable and amplifying girls’ voices around the world.
I am so very proud to have Malala Yousafzai as godmother of Celebrity Edge. Malala embodies our commitment to opening the world through education and gender equality. Seeing her aboard our ship sends a powerful message to our crew who represent over 70 diverse nationalities, and our guests who we sail all over the world.
…stated Mrs. Lutoff-Perlo.
Celebrity Edge will begin her inaugural season sailing alternating seven- night eastern and western Caribbeanitineraries before transporting guests to the stunning vistas of the Mediterranean with a range of seven- to 11-night sailings from iconic cities like Barcelona and Rome in 2019. Sailing round-trip from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Celebrity Edge will make her first maiden voyage on December 9, 2018.
