Really? I hear (not just on here, but in several other contexts) enough people talking about "unplugging" to relax that I don't think this is true for many people.
Yup. If my connected life was so stressful that I needed to "unplug" to enjoy my vacation, you'd hear it from me too!
But, paper and energy use are not significant factors: they are barely noise in the expense, waste, and energy that
DCL generates. Just did some quick math - you could print a navigator for every stateroom on all 5 ships, every night for a year, and the total amount of paper would be less than 10 pallets. That might seem like a lot at first, but this is for the entire cruise line for the entire year, and would cost under $25K. And, the energy taken to run the printer is probably less than the energy used for charging everyone's phones and running the needed wifi over the ship (just guessing, there).
I doubt anyone loses sleep over the $ cost of paper. Or of plastics, for that matter. The issue here is environmental. One of cutting down trees and forests - you know.
As a reference, one tree gives you about 8,000 sheets of copy paper.
https://www.cattlv.wnyric.org/cms/lib/NY19000422/Centricity/Domain/13/GREEN FACTS.pdf
These navigators, on the other hand, use high-quality paper with 2x-4x density. On average, that would mean no more than 3,000 sheets per tree.
So, in 2019, one Disney ship was going through almost a tree every night. That's 350 trees per ship per year - roughly. For the 300 or so cruise ships in the world, that's more than 100,000 trees per year just for these navigators. Or about 260 acres of forest. Enough to take out a national park in Arkansas in 7-8 years. Well, maybe a bit longer if recycling was at hand.
ps. I should note that 'trees' and 'environment' may well be gospel to you. On a cruise ship, no less. In which case you can safely ignore me.
And, the energy taken to run the printer is probably less than the energy used for charging everyone's phones and running the needed wifi over the ship (just guessing, there).
A Xerox multi-function printer prints 50 pages per minute (though nearly not as much if full color). Our 3,000 sheets will take no less than one hour. The printer is rated at 700 watts for continuous use, so in one hour you will use 42,000 watts - roughly.
https://www.support.xerox.com/en-us/article/en/x_vlc400_en-O1332
An average iPhone battery stores about 12 watt-hour of energy. Looking up, scrolling, and moving around the app would take no more than a single watt out of that. If.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/22/iphone-battery-mah-capacity-list/
So, perspective. Printing single-page navigators every night on a cruise ship takes the same amount of energy as using the app to do it on at least 42,000 iPhones. That's 10 mega-ships of iPhones at the very least.
But, in the big picture, the cost for software development/maintenance and so forth probably more than eats up any savings - I doubt they are coming out ahead at all in terms of $. It's likely the other aspects that make them decide it's worth it overall.
That said, the app really is poorly designed for displaying time-based information - they could improve it significantly if they allowed other (more navigator-like) views. Part of what frustrates me is that the app doesn't have to be as bad as it is for the schedule display - they developed a relatively poor substitute, and then forced people to switch to it; it really feels like they should have put a lot more work into the development of the app before forcing people to fully switch over to it.
Software development is a one-time cost. Maintenance is minimal for an app - which is just an interface for the data that already exists on the servers.
As for the design of the app, it's all personal. You might find it poorly designed - others may not. It's far from perfect (yup) and can be improved (most definitely) - but it shares that honor with every other Disney app out there.
I do agree they have many more reasons to make us use the app than just printing. I'd be disappointed if they didn't.
