It’s been a long time at port, but those massive cruise ships are sailing again,
offering guests an all-inclusive vacation in one place. But before you set sail, be wary.
Here are some shocking secrets from ship insiders the cruise companies don’t want you to know.
It sounds like the best deal around - an all-inclusive cruise! You pay the fare,
get on board, and you don’t have to worry about anything else. Eat to your heart’s content! Enjoy
all the shows and activities! But this can be deceptive, as almost all the top cruise
line companies put some activities behind a paywall for an additional fee. On many cruises,
it’ll only be some high-end restaurants for adults that charge you extra money.
But on many low cost cruises, more than half the restaurants and activities will
be extra - which means that rock-bottom price may grow quickly once the kids see what’s on board.
But there are ways you can make that money up.
Most cruise ships have a hidden secret - every restaurant is all-you-can-eat,
not just the buffets. This doesn’t apply to some of the premium ones, but included
restaurants will usually let you order anything you want for no additional fee. That means if
you’ve dug into your salmon and are still a little hungry before dessert, there’s nothing
stopping you from adding on a steak as a light side. This may vary between ships and companies,
but it applies to most dining options - but you can bet that the ship isn’t going to advertise it.
But we all know what we’re here for - the buffet!
It’s probably the most iconic part of the cruise ship experience - at any hour of the day,
you can belly up to the buffet and help yourself. But sometimes, the appearance doesn’t live up to
the hype. You’ve probably dug into a cruise ship buffet and thought it tastes just a little...off.
That’s probably because a buffet available at all hours has been sitting out there for
a while. While cruise ships are pretty vigilant about keeping their food safe, that doesn’t mean
it’s going to be the freshest. And if you’re worried about the buffet being no more due to
the pandemic, breathe easy - it’s still there, although a cast member may be serving you now.
But that doesn’t mean food safety is foolproof.
Cruise ships feed more people a day than almost any other environment in the world - and they
can’t get new shipments in while at sea. That means they have to keep food for thousands of
people fresh for as long as the cruise is going. And food poisoning has been the scourge of many
a cruise. In 2016, the massive Ovation of the Seas had an outbreak of over 200
cases of food poisoning traced back to one tainted brunch. And between 2008 and 2014,
a staggering 130,000 people reported getting a gastrointestinal illness while on board a cruise!
But there’s one area of cruise ship life that’s even trickier - the bar.
Alcohol is usually one of the few things that isn’t included in the initial fare,
but some companies including Royal Caribbean offer unlimited-booze packages for extra.
And this creates a challenge - how to handle countless drunk guests with cards that let them
have more booze. While most cruise companies cater to family travelers and less than ten percent
buy the booze passes, the companies do have a plan. If a bartender notices a drunk passenger,
they can temporarily deactivate their pass until they sober up - at which
point they’re free to come back for more - if they haven’t gotten tossed in the brig.
Wait, the brig?
Crime can be a problem on cruise ships - as it can be anywhere a whole bunch of people are crowded
together. All it takes is someone knocking over someone’s drink, and then you’re on a fight ship.
But the cruise companies are ready - every ship has a brig hidden somewhere on the ship. This is
essentially a jail cell where people can be held until they can be safely removed from the ship. As
for the law, because cruise ships frequently sail in international waters, anyone who breaks the law
on them is subject to international maritime law and will likely face trial back on the mainland.
But maritime law doesn’t always work against passengers.
If you went to Las Vegas when you were younger, you probably
came across a harsh reality - everything fun was twenty-one and up! Under US law,
you’ve got to be twenty-one to gamble - but on cruise ships, you’re not under US law. The odds
are your cruise ship will have a casino full of slot machines, card games, and roulette wheels.
And if you’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, going on a cruise might be your
only chance to win some big money gambling right now - or more likely, lose your shirt.
When you’re on the largest cruise ships, it can be easy to get lost.
Cruise ships are massive. We all know that. But most people don’t know how massive it is.
When Symphony of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever, debuted in 2015, it was almost a hundred
feet longer than the largest military aircraft carriers. It can carry almost nine thousand people
in total - almost seven thousand passengers plus a crew of over two thousand. It holds twenty-two
restaurants, over 2,700 hotel rooms, and dozens of activities spread out over eighteen massive decks.
It’s been described as a city at sea - and many people find navigating it overwhelming.
And with many people on board, there are always risks.
There’s often one additional passenger on board big cruises - the grim reaper.
With thousands of people on board at one time, there’s always a chance someone’s time will
run out. It’s usually natural causes - especially with how popular cruises
are with grandma and grandpa. But accidents are also possible, which is why the cruise
companies are so careful to cut people off when they’re getting a little too drunk.
How often do people die on cruise ships? From 2008 to 2018, Port Canaveral’s cruise hub
reported almost 130 naturally occurring deaths on ships coming out of the port.
But the ships have a plan.
Similar to the brig, not every spot on a cruise ship is magical. If you go down below, you’ll find
a climate-controlled area with a grim purpose - the cruise ship morgue. Most of the time,
this room goes unused, but should someone die on board, their body will be taken care of in the
same way as they would on dry land. It’ll be taken down there quickly after being placed in a body
bag - trying to alert as few people as possible to the fact that there’s been a death - and preserved
for medical examiners back on land. But in rare cases where the morgue fills up, ships
may get creative - storing bodies in a walk-in freezer or flying them back to the mainland.
But not all bodies stay on the ship.
One of the biggest risks of going on a cruise is that you’re in the middle of nowhere - and
one wrong move can send you overboard. Most of these are people showing off by getting on
the railing or stumbling around while drunk, but foul play can also play a role. Roughly
twenty people fall off a cruise ship or ferry every year, and while most of them are rescued,
that can be trickier when you’re on a fast-moving ship with thousands of people.
Between 2009 and 2016, eight people met their end falling off a cruise ship.
But it’s not the only way to get left behind by a cruise.
One of the most exciting parts of a cruise is those ports of call, where you’re let off the
ship for a day of fun in the sun. These beach days are so relaxing it’s easy to lose track
of time - but set an alarm, because when the crew says to be back by a certain time, they mean it.
They have a tight schedule to keep, and after a short buffer period for any stragglers,
they will simply leave anyone who didn’t make it back behind.
For those unfortunate stranded travelers, they’ll have to find their way back home on their own.
But cruise ship employees are trained for far worse situations.
Avast, ye mateys! The golden age of piracy is long behind us, but some pirates still sail the
open seas - especially off the west African coast. While they’re more likely to attack cargo ships,
there have still been incidents of them attacking cruise liners - and the crews are trained. When a
pirate attack happens, the crew will warn all passengers to get off the decks and
away from the windows. They’ll then unleash some non-lethal defenses, including water cannons and
sound cannons that emit a painful screeching sound. This will hopefully deter the pirates
enough for the ship to take evasive action - and give all the passengers a crazy story.
Some people, however, say cruise ships are a bigger threat to the environment than vice versa.
That’s a lot of people on board the ship - and a lot of flushing toilets. Cruise ships produce
a staggering 140,000 to 210,000 gallons of sewage each week, and it has to go somewhere. The toilets
are vacuum-flush models, similar to the ones on airplanes, and are usually connected to top-tier
water filtration and treatment systems. But once cruise ships are at least twelve miles from shore,
it’s open season - and much of that human waste gets dumped directly into the oceans below.
And that’s not the only way these massive liners impact the world.
When the bilge water is dumped into the ocean, it creates a massive amount of
sulfur dioxide - as much as millions of cars. These giant ships also run on powerful motors,
and you can often see them belching dark smoke into the skies. But that smoke doesn’t
always leave the ship - studies have been done on the air quality inside the ship,
and it revealed the disturbing fact that the air quality on crowded cruise ships
can be twenty times worse than the air quality in a busy, car-filled metropolis.
And it’s not surprising that there’s so much
pollution - given how many moving parts it takes to keep a cruise ship running.
The vacuum toilets on cruise ships might look like hotel toilets,
but they are a lot more vulnerable to clogs and other problems. They’re meant to flush
human waste and toilet paper - and nothing else. But most people don’t get the hint,
and it’s very common for people to flush thicker paper products or other items - leading to
disgusting clogs. This minor flushing mishap can lead to a major plumbing problem for a ship of
thousands - and can derail a whole cruise with disgusting orders if it’s in the wrong place.
It doesn’t take much to disrupt a cruise - as some ships find out the hard way.
When the Carnival Triumph ship had an engine fire, it disrupted the power to the entire
ship - knocking everything off-line. The plumbing system collapsed, leading to rising sewage,
but that wasn’t the only problem for the ship dubbed “the poop cruise”.
Food started going bad, the climate control system went down, and so did the ship’s steering system.
The more than three thousand passengers were stranded in a stinking ship for five days in
the Gulf of Mexico before salvation came - and they were towed to Alabama by another ship.
But it’s far from the worst crisis to erupt on a cruise ship.
One of the biggest crises any ship can face is an outbreak on board. A contagious disease
spreads like wildfire on a crowded cruise, with Norovirus being one of the most common. That’s
why each cruise ship comes with an outbreak prevention plan - mandated by the US health
department. As a virus spreads on board, the crew starts quietly taking extra precautions.
While they will rarely announce these issues to the passengers,
there are ways to notice. If the crew is serving you at the buffet, the odds are
you should be washing your hands and staying away from that guy blowing his nose on the tablecloth.
But some epidemics cause more drastic measures.
No one’s looking forward to the end of their cruise - unless, of course, it might never end.
When the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, among the first places hit outside of China were cruise
ships. And as fear of the virus spread, the ships found themselves quarantined indefinitely.
The crew - and the passengers. With the virus being largely unknown, no nation was willing to
take the risk of letting passengers disembark, and vacationers found themselves confined
to their rooms getting food delivered to them. The sickest people were airlifted off the boats,
but it was weeks before most guests were able to return home - and the crews found themselves
in for an even longer stay. The crisis looked like it might be the end of the cruise industry.
But as long as there are retirees looking to gamble on a boat, it’ll endure.
It was almost a year before ships set sail again from most ports, but a lot has changed. Most
ships have eliminated self-service buffets, but that’s not the only change - especially for the
crew. It’s common for everyone to have to pass a recent negative Covid test before boarding,
and getting approved to get off the ship for ports of call is a lot trickier.
But most of the old favorites of cruise ships are still there - and so are all the little
secrets they’re hoping you don’t think too hard about before you get on board.
For more of the craziest things to ever happen on cruises,
check out “Crazy But True Stories that Happened on Cruise Ships”
or watch “50 Insane Facts About Titanic You Didn’t Know” for tales of the worst cruise ever.