Not as much anymore as it used to be - you still have be be on-board by a certain time but almost all the ships have a buffet and/or a 24 hour restaurant. Although I was surprised to hear complaints about the line I like from people who are used to some of the others - why doesn’t everyone get assigned a table with other people at either the early or late seating and a show time based on the dinner seating.
Natalie Portman did this in a movie years back (Where the Heart Is – verges on glurge, but not toooo bad).
I can reassure you in that regard - if a member of the crew tells you “no sweat”, it’s not a command.
You’re probably thinking of standard Caribbean cruises, which don’t appeal to me at all. Some of the tourist towns I’ve been to are Copenhagen, Helsinki, Athens, Barcelona, Rome. We didn’t use the ship tours for any of these. In Aruba we got a bus pass and rode it through the places where the normal people lived. In Talinn we spent the day at a museum documenting the Russian oppression of the Estonians.
When we sailed on the QE2 over 40 years ago we had fixed meal times, but these days you are a lot more flexible, and can make reservations over a range of times. But the food is one of the least appealing parts of the cruise to us. It’s good, but not like it was 40 years ago.
As someone else mentioned, cruises are best as sampler trips, getting to see just a bit of places. I definitely want to go back to Stockholm, Rome, not so much.
Yeah, but Natalie Portman! 
Perfect time to work on the great American novel!
We often arrange our own tours, mostly bird watching. This has included driving a golf cart to the salt flats in Bonaire, guided birding tours from Quito, in Aruba, Tobago, Dominica, and Antigua (getting dropped at and picked up at a lonely crossroad, jumping onto a wooden plank across the back of a pickup, and heading into a jungle with some guy with a machete). In Jerusalem’s Old City, I toured several other people around for the day because I had lived there and can chatter in Hebrew.
The cruise industry (or at least Jimmy Buffet’s slice of it) is trying new packages to attract customers.
When I first heard about it , I was wondering what the catch was. And then I saw - you have to book between 24-72 hours before sailing, which means the alternative is sailing with those cabins empty. And like always with a cruise “free” means the cruise fare is free. You’ll still pay an admin/booking fee, port taxes , gratuities and a fuel supplement and you have to pay a single supplement if you are sailing alone - even though one guest would be free.
And the biggest catch as far as this thread goes - it’s only good on two night cruises and you can’t use the pass on consecutive cruises.
I got a tour of one of those boomers once, and was amazed at the amount of space. One of the guys with me was jumping up and dow, trying – and failing – to reach the overhead. Or the two treadmills back in the engine room, side by side, with a TV and DVD player on a shelf in front of them.
Longest I spent submerged was around 52-53 days, on a much smaller boat. No problem.
Financial problems leave the future of the cruise in doubt, with many people seeking refunds.
Well, I guess I’m glad I didn’t sign up. 
Thanks for the update.
mmm
Well, I called that one. See post 179.
Username checks out.
Post 180, I think you meant.
Who thought it would work?
The latest news: they’re going ahead with a larger ship.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/three-year-cruise-life-at-sea/index.html
It was Miray [Cruise’s]'s ship, the MV Gemini, that had been earmarked as the vessel to be used for the cruise back in March – something that became central to the breakdown in relationships between Miray and members of the former Life at Sea executive team.
Around 22 members of the team including the MD, chief technology officer and director of sales and marketing “stepped away” from the project, Mikael Petterson, the former MD, told CNN at the time. The sales and marketing director, Irina Strembitsky, went further, alleging that the ship was deemed “unseaworthy” by an engineer, who also expressed doubt that it would be able to complete a three year journey – an allegation now at the heart of a defamation case brought by Miray.
All 22 leavers, say Petterson, are now working on a rival project: Villa Vie Residences – which, according to the website, will be a “world cruise… circumnavigating the globe every three and a half years.”
So, you possess a cruise ship:
Why would you sell 3 year cruises at a steep daily discount to what you could get for selling one week cruises?
So, you love cruises
Why would you buy a 3 year cruise rather than multiple separate cruises - unless there was a steep discount?
So, you are a mega cruise line:
If the economics are compelling, why arent you doing this?
So, you are a ship expert;
Can a cruise ship simultaneously be not fancy enough for short cruises and yet a wonderful home for a three years sentence?
IANA expert. I’m not a big enthusiast for this idea for myself, but here are some plausible answers to your various points.
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The cruise line avoids all the selling costs for 3 * 52 - 1 = 155 weeks’ of cruises.
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The cruise line avoids all the uncertainty of filling the ship both during high season and during slow season.
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The cruise line avoids all the various port expenses and unproductive ship time wasted while swapping out passengers 155 times. etc.
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The cruise line will receive the next 3 years’ of revenue all up front & can invest that.
The typical passenger’s goal for this sort of trip is likely very different from merely cruising.
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If I was to do this, I’d sell all my land-side real estate, turn in my leased apartment, sell or store my car(s) and other possessions, etc. The cruise replaces all my daily living expenses, it’s not in addition to them as would be the case if I took a succession of short cruises with short breaks. Said another way, the first some-odd thousand dollars of monthly cruise fare is paid for by the spending I’m no longer doing land-side. That’s a huge “discount” in effect.
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Part of the goal is to “Stop the world; I want to get off.” For reasons of politics, or personal safety paranoia, or whatever. Get away from most of humanity. And it’s a decent bet many of your fellow passengers are like-minded, so there’ll be built-in commonality there.
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Heck, if I had to pay $50K up front per year, so $150K total, and after a year I had gotten tired of it, maybe I can resell my remaining two years’ space the way people (try to) resell timeshares. Or just walk away from it; the money is sunk cost to me and it’s a lesson learned. I’ve certainly wasted money in other silly ways over the years. Meanwhile the cruise line can resell my abandoned space as a 2-year cruise to somebody else. Win-win for them.
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As a variation on the above, for someone who’s approaching the old folks’ home stage of their life, this might be a nice way to do “independent living” with a lot more variety than there is at “Shady Acres” in/near your hometown. At various Independent Living places the residents jokingly call it a “landlocked cruise ship to nowhere” due to the communal meals, on-campus activities and entertainments, and limited access to the outside world since most of the residents can’t drive anymore and rely on the facility’s bus to get to the store, doctors, etc. Which suits many people at that slow-go or even no-go stage of their life.
I don’t know that “fancy” is really the word you want here. I think the word you want is “different”.
A ship that’s set up for people to reside on for a week of novelty and excessive gluttonous food & booze consumption will need more casino & live entertainment space, and a large variety of eateries & drinkeries.
A ship that’s set up for living on long-term will ideally have the same space deployed differently. And probably more total space per passenger.
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Perhaps the economics are not “compelling”, but they’re pretty similar. A guy with a vision is trying to make this long-term cruise idea happen. If it works, the suits at the corporate cruise lines will copycat immediately. If it falls flat, they won’t. Letting somebody else, ideally a start-up, blaze a trail to a new product line is time-honored corporate behavior.
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And of course just as there are cruise lines catering to the rather wealthy and others catering to the rather scruffy, this sort of long-term cruise could be aimed at several different levels of SES. I don’t see e.g. Carnival trying long-term cruises because their baseline clientele isn’t rich enough. But once you start talking about people able to pay $100K, 200, 400, 800K per year for a lifestyle, now there’s money to be made. If there are enough such people.
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Ref your previous question, if long-term cruising catches on, the big lines will have significant expenses in reconfiguring one or more ships to the new mission. They’d like to be sure that will work before they write that check. But once they are sure, they’ll do it.
Yep - if I go on a cruise or to a resort for a week or two or three, I’m going to probably want some sort of entertainment every night whether it’s a stand up comedian or a band or a Broadway type show. But for three years, I’d want something closer to my normal life - I could go out to a show of some sort every night living on land but I don’t.