AIDA Cruises officially opened its fully modernised fleet operations centre (FOC) in Hamburg, Germany on Monday, 2nd September.

The FOC is part of Carnival Maritime GmbH (CMG), which was established in 2015 as a maritime service unit for AIDA Cruises and Costa Cruises. 

The embedded FOC, which is available around the clock for cruise ships, plays a central role and serves as the first point of contact and support center.

At this new FOC, all relevant data from 31 cruise ships is collected around the clock over a 250-sqm area. This includes data from eleven AIDA ships as well as 20 other ships belonging to Carnival Corporation’s European cruise brands. 

The FOC uses fully digital ship monitoring technology to capture speed, weather, and navigation data, as well as various technical data from the ships’ engine rooms, via satellites in near real-time. 

This enables the ship crews to better plan and optimize fuel and energy consumption, routes, water management, and various logistics processes in the more than 250 ports worldwide that AIDA Cruises visits with its cruise ships. As a result, fuel consumption and thus the ships’ emissions are significantly reduced. 

A “Tactical Table,” a kind of digital workbench equipped with software, as well as a modern ship simulator, help to present various scenarios and conduct individual training sessions.