Hotel Section News

Island Crown is the latest vessel to come from the relationship between Island Offshore and Rolls-Royce. Once again the UT 776 CD has been selected as the basis for a vessel to meet some special offshore requirements. Over the past few years, the Norwegian shipowner has added several batches of the UT 776 platform supply vessel to its fleet, including two fuelled with LNG. This time around, the design brief was a vessel that will usually spend its time connected to an offshore platform, acting as a hotel for people working on the platform.

Costa Cruises, a tourism group based in Italy, announced that in the space of three months five Costa ships were dry-docked to carry out scheduled maintenance. Costa Cruises has invested around $28m in this planned maintenance work. Operations were carried out on the Costa Serena, the Costa Europa, the Costa Atlantica (in Palermo), the Costa Romantica (in Genoa) and the Costa Concordia (in Trieste) from the end of October 2008 to the end of January 2009. In particular, the Costa Serena (114,500 gross tonnage and guest capacity of 3780), the company’s flagship, was the last Costa ship to be dry-docked from 28 January to 11 February 2009 in Fincantieri’s Palermo shipyard. Two of the key improvements being made on the Costa Serena are specific shipboard energy and fuel-saving measures.