I used to post here a while back, then I dropped out for a few years. During that time, from about September '06 to September '07, I worked on NCL America’s Pride of Hawaii, a large luxury ocean liner that sailed the Hawaiian Islands. So if there’s anything you ever wanted to know about life aboard a cruise ship, or the cruising industry in general, go ahead and ask.
How often do people take off when you put into port somewhere and never come back? Do you have to find them?
Is Gopher still a whiney prick?
What percentage of the crew did you sleep with?
Is there a valid concern about young kids climbing railings, etc and risking going overboard (recurring nightmare of an upcoming trip…)?
IIRC, there’s not casino on this ship. Is there a secret one, and if so, what’s the password? If not, PM me the password.
Do you end up resenting the passengers?
What are work conditions like for the staff?
I know that when at sea, the crew works 7 days a week.
I took a cruise a couple years ago, on a ship with 1500 vacationers and I think 600 staff workers, most of whom were Indonesian and Fillipino. The kitchen workers, room cleaners, etc were invisible to us.
They were away from home for a year or two at a time, and as far as I know were never permitted on the parts of the ship where people were having fun. (this true at any hotel, of course, but hotel workers get to go home at the end of their shift. From what I heard of the cruise ship staff, they never even got to go outside on the open air decks. They made good money by third-world standards, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Was I being over-sensitive, or do bitter feelings develop between workers and managers when they are all cooped up together for months on end?
What were your job responsibilities?
What did you do with your free time, if you had any?
What was your room like?
Doesn’t a cruise ship sailing from US port to US port need to use American crews and follow US labor laws?
What kind of stupid questions did you get?
My folks are RV workkampers, and they spent a summer in Alaska a few years back. They also dealt with the cruise ships, and had such excellent questions as “Do you accept American money” and “Where’s the petting zoo? We want to see the mammoths.” (There were mammoth fossils and bones available for sale.)
Passengers or crew? As for passengers, they were responsible for getting themselves back to the ship before the whistle. If they didn’t, we left without them. It didn’t happen very often.
Members of the crew jumped ship all the time. Or got fired. You never knew who you were going to be working with from day to day.
Any rumors you may have heard are true.
These ships are actually very safe places to be. If your stateroom has a balcony, keep the door locked when you’re not in port. There is no reason anybody should be hanging out there while the ship is underway. And do try to keep the kids from climbing the railings.
You are correct, casino gaming is illegal in Hawaii. And no, there are no secret casinos that I know of. However, there was a big empty space that was rumored to be the future casino site, if the ship ever went international. And lo and behold, it did. Last February it was rechristened The Norwegian Jade and sent off to the Med. No more pesky blue laws. And now they have a casino in that spot.
Yes. For a thousand reasons, but mainly because our recruiters and trainers told us we’d clean up in tips, and suffice it to say that didn’t happen. Our typical passengers were horrible tippers. Many of them came from countries where tipping isn’t customary. We despised the Australians, for example. They drank the most and tipped the least.
At sea or in port, except for the performers and cruise director’s staff, every member of the crew works seven days a week, ten to twelve hours a day.
And you’re highlighting an important difference between the culture of American-flagged vessels vs. “internationals” (as we called them). The vast, vast majority of crew on foreign-flagged ships come from the Philippines, India, and Eastern Europe. Places where people are struggling to make better lives for themselves. Where a person could do pretty well on what they pay on these ships (very little, by Western standards). So they take their jobs pretty seriously.
But NCL America stays in US waters all the time, which means their ships must sail under the American flag. And American-flagged ships must be crewed by Americans. Americans who think it might be cool to try working on a cruise ship. We got paid more, and treated better than the crews of foreign-flags, because the company had to abide by American labor standards, and because they needed us more than we needed them.
Our contracts were sixteen to twenty weeks, with five to eight weeks off. I did two of them. The contracts for the crew on international ships were more like nine to twelve months, with two months off a year. Yes, we were expected to keep away from the passenger areas, but there was a little crew deck we could use on Tuesdays, which was Volcano Night. That was when we’d sail up real close to the lava at Kilauea and watch it flow into the ocean.
I should mention something about the living situation. If you’ve ever taken a cruise, and had an inside stateroom, you know how small they are. There were four of us living in a space just a smidgen smaller than that. Two sets of bunk beds, and a bathroom quite literally the size of a small closet. About half the size of the bathroom in a passenger stateroom. Yet somehow we made it work.
My first contract I worked as a server in the bar department. It was an amazing amount of fun, but it was a kid’s job, so for my second contract I switched unions and got more into the industrial side of things. I was an “Environmental Operator”. Each of these big cruise ships has basically a small recycling plant on board. With 3,000 passengers and crew, you can imagine how much trash a ship like that produces. Using very loud machines, I would crush the cans, smash the glass, shred the cardboard, stuff like that. It was a hot, filthy, noisy, sweaty job, but I had a great time.
In our free time, we drank. And also while working. The job and lifestyle was incredibly stressful, believe it or not. But we had the advantage of being in port every day, with overnights on Maui and Kauai. And when we weren’t on duty, we got off the ship and went straight to a bar and got blasted. Honestly, there wasn’t much time to do anything else, remember how I said we worked ten to twelve hours a day?
I should mention that they had a little crew-only bar on board the ship, but they only served beer and wine, no hard liquor.
I did get to do a few things in the little spare time I had, like riding a moped through the countryside in Kauai, and watching the sun rise from above the clouds at the summit of Haleakala crater, 10,000 feet above the sea, and I even made it to the beach a few times.
Was there any fraternizing with the passengers? Sex between crew and passengers?
Also, and this may be delicate (and silly)…but if the quarters were so small and filled with 4 guys per room, how did you manage to find room to…well, you know.
Yes, I’m glad you brought this up. Due to an important provision of US Maritime law known as the Jones Act, a foreign-flagged ship sailing from an American port cannot enter another American port without first stopping at a foreign port if conveying cargo or people… I don’t know all the details, but that’s the gist of it.
Now, look at Hawaii on a globe. It’s all by itself out there. It is literally the remotest population center on Earth. So cruise ships that sailed the Hawaiian islands had to go pretty far out of their way just to “clear port”. Instead of just going from Maui to Oahu, they had to stop at a place called Fanning Island, Republic of Kiribati in between, never mind that it was several thousand miles out of the way. They tried to play it up like it was this great destination, but it took like two days to get there, and who the hell wanted to go there anyway?
So Norwegian Cruise Lines decided they wanted to offer all-Hawaiian itineraries. They spun off a whole new division - NCL America - just for that reason. This was less than ten years ago, and there was no such thing as a big American-flagged cruise ship. Because it would have to be crewed by Americans, and the conventional wisdom was that Americans were too lazy and spoiled for this kind of work.
But they’re managing. When I first joined the crew, things were a real mess. Turnover was epic. People were jumping ship (quitting without notice, by just getting off the ship and not coming back) in droves. You literally did not know who was still going to be there from day to day.
But things stabilized little by little, and eventually they had a pretty tight operation going, even with all the lazy, spoiled Americans aboard. Of course it didn’t hurt that the industry’s lobby managed to weaken the labor protections in the Jones act. At first, 75% of the crew had to be US citizens, and 25% could be greencard holders. Now, those 25% don’t need to have greencards, work visas will do. I was on the ship when the first wave of “internationals” joined the crew. It was interesting times.
Anyone who was caught in a passenger’s room who didn’t have business there was fired immediately. I knew a couple of guys who were invited by some women passengers to join them in the hot tub in their suite. They were caught on security cameras and gone the next day.
Now, lots of things happened off the ship, while we were in port overnight. But smart people kept their mouths shut about them.
Curtains.
Well durn, we used your very ship just a bit after you left; at year’s end. I promise we didn’t generate much trash and tipped decidedly well. The crew member we bonded with most closely was the fella that set us up in the room, took care of our luggage and got whatever we needed. I’m sorry to say I’ve forgotton what that position is called.
The materials you processed… is everything disposed of on land somewhere? I remember asking about what Hawaiians did with their trash, but not the ships. Is anything sunk offshore?
(Molokini Crater and Na Poli were too cool, as was hangin’ on the North Shore)
Huh. That’s very different from the impression I had. I have a cousin who spent several years as a performer on a cruise line. (She provided background music - “ambiance”- in the dining rooms.) She told me she usually worked an average of fifteen hours a week.
I guess the lesson here is: if you’re gonna work on a cruise ship, be part of the entertainment.