Cruise ship evacuated off Greek island:
Is one crew member per one passengers a normal staff level for these big cruisers?
That seems awfully high. What would so many crew do with themselves?
A 1:1 ratio would be one crewmember per passenger. What you have above is a 1:3 ration. Consider what you need to run a cruise ship: essentially, all the services for a small town. You need power, medical facilities, shops, restaurants, police, etc. Added to that, you also need propulsion and navigation. I’m quite sure the passenger services crew to passenger ratio is nowhere near 1:3.
Also keep in mind that many of those services must be available 24 hours a day. Now, a restaurant (for instance) may not need the same amount of staffing at 2 am as it does at 2 pm, or at 7 am as it does at 7 pm, but it is likely that both the passenger services crew and the other crew require enough people to staff multiple shifts over the course of a day or a week.
(I don’t know what standard staffing is, and I have no experience with cruises, but a large cruise boat requires a lot of staff to keep it running effectively. )
I think you meant one crew member per three passengers.
A hotel would have a maid for every 20 rooms or so; a resturant, a server and perhaps a cook for every 6 tables or so; plus bartenders; activity specialists; medical personnel, store keepers, entertainers, bookeepers, plus real crew like engineers & pilots.
That was a typo. It’s the 1:3 that seems pretty high to me.
They eat the crewmembers? 
Cruise ships also operate almost around the clock so you need three shifts to cover a lot of the services. The labor on cruise ships is fairly cheap, so they use more labor than services or mechanization. For example most of the food is prepared from scratch, rather than buy ready made food that could be frozen and re-heated.
In Mexico at a resort we saw a swarm of workers manicuring a lawn with small hand tools. I guess it was cheaper than running some sort of mower to do the job.
The entertainment is also counted as crew - musicians, dancers, magicians, hypnotists, etc.
You must be forgetting all the fourth-rate crew members shoveling coal and feeding the hamsters down in the bowels of the boat.
Just checking the stats for Disney Cruise Line, both ships have a ratio of about 1:2½
So that ratio is within the normal range.
Thanks.
The one datum point I can provide is the boat trip I took 2 years ago.
As I recall, there were 14 passengers on the boat, including two people who were running the week-long seminar on underwater photography. (I think maximum capacity of the boat was 20 passengers.)
The crew to run the boat, handle the machinery, work the dive dock, fill air tanks, develop slide film, cook three hot meals and two fresh snacks a day, serve & clean meals, service cabins, wash towels, keep the deck showers clean and supplied, sell cruise line merchandise, sell batteries and other sundries, etc, etc, etc, and otherwise keep a 100’ boat up and running 18 hours a day was five people.
So that’s about a 3:1 passenger to crew ratio, with a max of 4:1.