(Image credit: Brian Stansberry)
When air travel took off in the 1960s, it looked at first like ocean liners were about to go the way of the horse and buggy. But then, the quick-thinking shipping industry adapted. With a few tweaks to onboard services and some smart marketing, they reinvented their fleets. No longer was a vast ship a way to get somewhere else- out was the destination itself. The idea took: More than 20 million people embarked on seafaring vacations in 2013. If you’re planning to join them this year, there are a few things you should know.
(Image credit: Jim G from Silicon Valley, CA, USA)
1. Prepare to eat a ton. How do you keep several thousand high-paying passengers happy? Massive provisioning, of course. According to one 2012 report, the Disney Magic cruise carried 10,000 pounds of chicken and 71,500 eggs for a weeklong jaunt for 2,700 people. Another boat stowed 2,000 pounds of shrimp. Rest assured that nothing is wasted. Ingredients left over from dinner later appear in the salad bar.
(Image credit: Flickr user Ricky Brigante)
2. Choose the room with no view. It’s understandable that cruise lines would promote rooms with balconies and portholes as the hottest spots onboard. But the best rooms in the ship are the ones in the lower middle section with no views at all, especially if you’re trying to avoid seasickness. The center of a ship acts as a fulcrum, so when the seas toss and pitch, a central room on a lower level could be the most steady- in addition to being pocketbook friendly.
3. Use the hand sanitizer! Along with the complimentary beverages, antibacterials are supplied in liberal quantities. Since close quarters and occasional sanitary mishaps can make ships a hive of quick spreading illness, cruise lines also employ onboard doctors. (And in case things go really wrong, they’re also equipped with small morgues, typically capable of holding up to three bodies.)
4. Do not read the man overboard list. If you’re the nervous type, steer clear of this Cruisepage.com compendium, which tracks the location of everyone who’s fallen off a ship since 2000. Some of these people -passengers and crewmembers- were rescued. Many were not.
(Image credit: Flickr user Corey Seeman)
5. Enjoy the sunset from the bow. Big ships trail a wake of treated sewage. According to a 2009 report, a typical one-week voyage by a medium-sized vessel can generate 210,000 gallons of human sewage (or “black water,” which is treated onboard and expelled as “gray water”), enough to fill about 10 backyard swimming pools, and another 1,000,000 gallons from sinks, baths, and laundry, also known as gray water.
6. Raise a glass to the crew. (Or they’ll do it for you.) “There’s definitely a lot of drinking and partying,” a restaurant employee who spent 10 months working on a major cruise line says, “We were all drunk all the time.”
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The article above, written by Matt Haber, is reprinted with permission from the May 2014 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!
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1) Wake up early -- the other poster complaining about the guys in the hot tubs the whole time? They probably were out late. We woke up at 7am and got just about everything to ourselves: Got to do the fancy water slides several times before a line started, got to swim, use the hot tubs, etc. No traffic at all until maybe 9-10am.
2) Get to know your porter -- the guy that fixes up your room all the time -- They have very interesting lives, not from the wild-and-crazy standpoint, but they are typically from a poorer country, sending money home to their families. Goes the same for your waiters, servers, or any other crew you can meet. The less "public" the staff person is, the more likely that person has a life very different from yours, and the more value you'll get from sharing in their lives.
3) Educate each other. -- I went on a cruise with a family of teachers, and I loved it. At each port, we split up into groups to do different excursions, and when we got back together for dinner, we got to tell each other all the cool stuff we learned about the places we visited. It was super interesting.
4) Room on the bottom floor, middle. This was already mentioned in the article, but if you can get a middle-of-the-boat room, you deal less with the rocking of the boat. Most people don't spend much time in their rooms anyway, so it's not a big deal if they are sparse.
5) If you're engineering-minded, check out the inside-the-boat tour. They take you down to the engine control room, inside the kitchen, behind the scenes, up where the pilots drive the boat. Fascinating stuff.
The mindset of my fellow travelers was a sort of near panic that they would not get enough to eat. One time I had my tray on the rail and was looking at the menu and my tray starts moving down the line. The woman next to me was pushing it away. She was "hungry, dammit!"
When I and my group were eating in the elegant dining room they were serving filet mignon that night. I and 3 others in our group did not receive 'filet mignon' or even a close approximation. They were cheap cuts (I know chuck when I see it) and we sent them back. The chef came out and was furious with us. We finally did get the right cuts but what an experience.
The hot tubs were occupied by 4 walruses smoking big fat cigars with ash lying on their enormous bellies. They sat in those tubs all day long ogling the women and girls. They never left the tubs empty. One of them would waddle off to grab some food and booze and bring it back to be eaten while they continued dissolving in the tub.
The swimming pool was packed with kids doing the potty dance and then not. nuh uh
That's just a small sampling of what I experienced on board. Never again.