6 Things Royal Caribbean's CEO Won't Change, and Whether He Is Right

Michael Bayley has run Royal Caribbean International since 2014. Every year he sails the President’s Cruise and takes live questions from cruise fans, with no screened submissions and no PR filter between him and the microphone. Six requests keep coming back. Six times he has said no and explained why.

Below is each refusal in his own words, with current numbers next to it.

Why won’t Royal Caribbean offer all-inclusive pricing?

Celebrity Cruises built a drink package and WiFi into its All Included fare. Fans asked why Royal Caribbean would not do the same.

Bayley: “Our research says around about 50% of the guests don’t want a beverage package. Our strategy has always been the unbundling of pricing to give people as much choice as they possibly can.” He added that unbundling puts a lower up-front number in front of families, and families are the core target market.

Run the math at current pricing. The Deluxe Beverage Package costs $65 to $120 per person per day, priced dynamically by ship and sail date, plus an 18 percent gratuity on the package price. Bundle that into every fare and a seven-night cruise climbs by roughly $455 to $840 per guest before that gratuity.

For the half of guests who skip the package, that is a straight fare increase with no benefit attached.

The math holds, with a gap in it. Forcing a package on people who do not want it is a real cost landing on real guests. What Bayley’s figure leaves out is the pressure after you book. Every add-on gets marketed hard from that point on, and a bundled fare gives a family one number to plan around. His data may be right that half the ship skips the package. The open question is how many of the other half would pay more up front to know their total before boarding.

Why isn’t cruise ship WiFi free?

Bayley, same setting: “Are we going to give free WiFi? No. We got to pay a ton, a ton, a ton of money for WiFi.”

That sounds like theatre. The numbers back him.

Hardware runs $2,500 per antenna, so a two-terminal setup costs about $5,000 before a single guest logs in. Overage data runs $2 per GB.

The large installations dwarf that. Royal Caribbean reportedly spent $1.25 million putting Starlink’s Community Gateway on Star of the Seas, which delivers 10 Gbps symmetrical throughput. Guests pay around $20 a day per device.

Ships run on satellite. Land resorts run on cable that is already built and largely paid off. That gap is the whole argument.

This is the most defensible refusal on the list. The cost structure at sea differs from a hotel on land, and the dollar figures back what he said.

Why can’t you stay overnight at Perfect Day CocoCay?

Guests started asking the moment the island opened. Bayley said Royal Caribbean looked into it and called the idea “problematic” once the logistics got real.

The scale explains why. Royal Caribbean expanded the island to handle up to 13,000 guests a day, a figure CEO Jason Liberty gave in 2023. The pier berths two ships at a time. Everything the island runs on, the staff, the food, the supplies and the equipment, comes off the ships each morning and goes back each evening. There is no independent supply route feeding the island on its own.

SVP Vicki Freed added the guest side: cruisers like the beach day, but “they really do want to come back onto the ship and enjoy the fine dining and they want to enjoy the entertainment that we have onboard.”

This one is operational reality rather than corporate excuse. Running a day-trip island for 13,000 people is a different business from running one where guests sleep. Overnight stays would require a second crew rotation and a supply chain the island does not have, for demand Royal Caribbean’s own guest data says may not be there.

One naming note, since it changed after the video was filmed. Royal Caribbean dropped the “at.” The island is now Perfect Day CocoCay.

Why does Royal Caribbean still allow smoking in the casino?

This one draws the most heat.

Bayley: “The dilemma is that there are many people who do want to smoke in the casino. I know that’s not a popular response, but it’s the truth.” Royal Caribbean tests this every couple of years by banning smoking on one or two ships. His result: “less people go in the casino, and that’s the reality of it.”

Royal Caribbean does not break out casino revenue. Onboard revenue including gaming runs roughly 30 percent of total cruise income industry-wide. If a smoking ban shrinks casino traffic the way Bayley describes, that lands on a meaningful share of the business.

Royal Caribbean has moved on the guest side, at a cost. Utopia of the Seas converted a wine bar, a comedy club and an English pub into a larger non-smoking casino, which opened in May 2025. The original casino then became the smoking room.

The business case and the guest experience pull hardest against each other here. Testing shows fewer people gamble in a smoke-free casino, and that revenue is real. It still leaves the current setup uncomfortable for anyone hoping for a smoke-free evening near the slots. The wider set of casino changes that landed this year is covered in 4 Royal Caribbean Casino Changes That Cost You More.

Will Royal Caribbean make Diamond Plus and Pinnacle harder to reach?

No. Bayley: “No, we have no plans to do that.”

He pointed to where the complaints cluster: trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific crossings, where top-tier members concentrate. “Ninety percent of the sailings, it’s just not true” that a ship feels overrun with Diamond Plus and Pinnacle members.

Royal Caribbean keeps its membership counts by tier private, so there is no released figure to test that 90 percent against. The thresholds are public.

Both of the top numbers take years of frequent cruising, which lends weight to his argument even without a headcount.

This is a real data point worth remembering if you are chasing status. The crowding complaint sounds louder online than it likely plays across the fleet. Royal Caribbean has the sailing-by-sailing numbers and is choosing not to publish them. What each tier is worth once you get there is the subject of 6 Royal Caribbean Crown & Anchor Tiers Worth Chasing.

Why aren’t gratuities included in the cruise fare?

Guests have asked more than once why gratuities sit as a separate daily charge some people remove at the front desk.

Those rates last rose on 1 November 2024 and have not moved since.

Bayley leaned on international expectations, calling the current setup “the model that seems to be genuinely the most productive, effective, and rewarding for the employees.” He acknowledged tradeoffs and landed on: “We think we’ve got the right system in place.”

This is the refusal I question most. The international-market argument is understandable. A system that depends on guests choosing not to remove their gratuities bets crew pay on guest goodwill, sailing after sailing. That is a shakier foundation than his framing suggests.

What do the six refusals have in common?

Line them up and a pattern appears that you miss one at a time.

That distinction tells you which of the six could move. A cost-based refusal shifts when the cost shifts. Satellite internet keeps getting cheaper, and the hardware figure in this post already fell by half against the video. The island’s capacity keeps growing. Both of those could look different in five years with no change in philosophy.

A preference-based refusal only changes if the company decides to change its mind. Gratuities is a choice sitting on this list, not a constraint, which is why it is the one most likely to stay put.

So which refusals hold up?

Two are solid: WiFi and the island. The cost and logistics arguments are specific to how a ship operates, and the figures back both.

Two are reasonable: all-inclusive pricing and the Diamond Plus pushback. Both rest on real data. Neither dataset is one you can check.

One is understandable and still uncomfortable: casino smoking. The revenue at stake is real. The outcome is poor for anyone near a smoking table for a week.

One is wrong: gratuities. It is the only refusal on the list built on preference instead of proof.