Celebrity Cruises CEO Shares Experiences Facing Gender Gap

It was only when she moved into the operations department at Royal Caribbean in 2005, said Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, that she realized what a “huge gender gap” existed in the company and in the industry in general. Now CEO of Celebrity Cruises, a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean, Lutoff-Perlo addressed the Dean’s Distinguished Leisure Series at the Boston University School of Hospitality Administration, saying she has led the company to a different culture where the female contingent of bridge crews has soared from three percent to 30 percent, including the first and only female American captain of a cruise ship.

Lutoff-Perlo, answering questions from Dean Arun Upneja, traced her career from its beginnings in hotel sales and then as a travel advisor in Massachusetts. She said she had never been on a cruise – or even traveled very much before taking the travel agency position. When a cruise line salesperson told her his job would be open soon, she applied for it and was later told she had “come in second.” She later learned that the person who did get the job, a man, did not last through the probationary period.

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She was never called back by that cruise line, but she reapplied and interviewed and finally got the job. The experience was similar, she said, to when she asked for her current position as CEO three times before achieving it.

In 1985, Lutoff-Perlo joined Royal Caribbean – the company’s only brand at the time – and spent many years in sales where she faced no discrimination because, she said, that is traditionally a field where there is a measure of equality. While her dream was to be head of sales, when her boss asked her to take a position as senior vice president of hotel operations for Celebrity Cruises in 2005, she accepted. When she later asked him why he had offered it to her when he knew what she would face, he said he didn’t think she would take it if he did.

In that position, she found not only the gender gap but other issues with diversity and culture. In addition, it was a challenge leading engineers and other operational staff when she was not familiar with the technologies or the systems. “I realized,” she asserted, “there was a job to do.” It was a desire at the top for real change, diversity and cultural transformation, she said, that kept her in the job.

The same executive who brought her into operations, said Lutoff-Perlo, suddenly moved her into marketing, which she thought would be the end of her career. After a stint there, she was back in operations in 2012 – as executive vice president of operations for Royal Caribbean, the first woman in the industry to oversee both hotel and marine operations.

It was when she finally became CEO, said Lutoff-Perlo, that she felt she had the influence, control and power to make real changes. One of the first things she did was name Kate McCue as a ship captain. She had known and been impressed by the officer for years, but McCue was consistently passed over for promotion. McCue is such a star, said Lutoff-Perlo, that she has 3.3 million followers on TikTok.

That was followed by a decision in 2019 to have an all-woman bridge crew at some point. It happened, she said, much faster than she expected, in March of 2020 to mark International Women’s Day.

The thinking behind all of this, said Lutoff-Perlo, is that “diversity is good for business.” When you have different voices at the table, she said, “you will have the best outcome and consumers more and more are voting with their wallets and choosing brands that share their values.”

“When I took the helm seven years ago we wanted that to be the direction we took,” said Lutoff-Perlo. “Not only do we offer amazing vacations but we care about the world at large – sustainability, diversity, inclusion.”

With that thinking in mind, Lutoff-Perlo became CEO around the time when the designs for the new Edge series of ships were in the planning stage. She looked at the plans and decided they did not fit her vision for a transformative product, and the company started from scratch.

With that overhaul, she said, it was decided that a transformational ship godmother was called for and executives thought Nobel laureate and feminist activist Malala Yousafzai would be the ideal choice. It took more than a year of persuasion, but Malala finally agreed and christened the ship. “She met all the young women on board,” said Lutoff-Perlo, and the entire crew was in tears.” That was a high point, she said, in her career.

That high point was followed just two years later by the low point – the pandemic, which she said “made you realize that things can be going great and suddenly change totally.” Getting through it has been the biggest challenge of her career, and Lutoff-Perlo said that what drove her was knowing crew members needed to get their jobs back. In many cases, they live in countries where there is no other opportunity.

When asked for her advice for aspiring hospitality leaders, Lutoff-Perlo said that hospitality is a unique business and involves “serious jobs” despite a widespread perception that it’s just fun. “You put your head on your pillow hoping there is no political unrest or another crisis. It’s not for the faint of heart but this industry provides things to people that no other industry does.”

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