cruise ship 6000 passengers

MSC Cruises ships ranked by size from biggest to smallest — the complete list

Are you looking for the MSC Cruises ships with the most things to do on board? If so, you'll want to get on one of the biggest MSC Cruises ships.

The biggest MSC Cruises ships have the most pools, hot tubs, waterslides and other deck-top allures, as well as the most restaurants, bars and entertainment venues. They have the biggest spas and casinos among ships in the MSC Cruises fleet, and the most cabins and suites — as well as the most variation in cabin and suite types.

With room for 6,000 passengers or more, the biggest MSC Cruises ships are truly massive resorts of the sort you find at such landlocked destinations as Las Vegas and Orlando. If you're in the "bigger is better" camp when it comes to a resort experience, these are the MSC Cruises ships for you.

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Still, MSC Cruises doesn't just operate giant vessels. The Switzerland-based cruise giant also operates quite a few relatively small cruise ships that carry just 2,000 or 3,000 people and have a much more intimate feel. In some cases, these vessels are just a third the size of the biggest MSC Cruises ships. These smaller vessels, notably, have far fewer deck-top activities and interior venues than the biggest MSC Cruises ships.

Vacationers who like their resort experiences on the more intimate side will want to gravitate to the smaller MSC Cruises ships.

Related: The 6 classes of MSC Cruises ships, explained

To make sure that you end up on the right MSC Cruises ship for you, it pays to study which MSC Cruises ships are the biggest and which are the smallest before booking.

Here, every MSC Cruises ship currently in operation is ranked from biggest to smallest.

1. MSC World Europa

Maiden voyage: 2022 Size: 215,863 gross tons Passenger capacity : 5,200

2. MSC Euribia

Maiden voyage: 2023 Size: 184,011 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,810

3 (tied). MSC Virtuosa

Maiden voyage: 2021 Size: 181,541 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,842

3 (tied). MSC Grandiosa

Maiden voyage: 2019 Size: 181,541 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,842

5 (tied). MSC Bellissima

Maiden voyage: 2019 Size: 171,598 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,488

5 (tied). MSC Meraviglia

Maiden voyage: 2017 Size: 171,598 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,488

7 (tied). MSC Seascape

Maiden voyage: 2022 Size: 170,412 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,540

7 (tied). MSC Seashore

Maiden voyage: 2021 Size: 170,412 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,540

9 (tied). MSC Seaview

Maiden voyage: 2018 Size: 153,516 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,132

9 (tied). MSC Seaside

Maiden voyage: 2017 Size: 153,516 gross tons Passenger capacity : 4,132

11 (tied). MSC Preziosa

Maiden voyage: 2013 Size: 139,400 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,502

11 (tied). MSC Divina

Maiden voyage: 2012 Size: 139,400 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,502

13 (tied). MSC Splendida

Maiden voyage: 2009 Size: 137,936 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,274

13 (tied). MSC Fantasia

Maiden voyage: 2008 Size: 137,936 gross tons Passenger capacity : 3,274

15. MSC Magnifica

Maiden voyage: 2010 Size: 95,128 gross tons Passenger capacity: 2,518

16. MSC Poesia

Maiden voyage: 2008 Size: 92,627 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,550

17 (tied). MSC Orchestra

Maiden voyage: 2007 Size: 92,409 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,550

17 (tied). MSC Musica

Maiden voyage: 2006 Size: 92,409 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,550

19 (tied). MSC Opera

Maiden voyage: 2004 Size: 65,591 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,150

19 (tied). MSC Lirica

Maiden voyage: 2003 Size: 65,591 gross tons Passenger capacity : 1,984

21 (tied). MSC Sinfonia

Maiden voyage: 2002 Size: 65,542 gross tons Passenger capacity : 1,984

21 (tied). MSC Armonia

Maiden voyage: 2001 Size: 65,542 gross tons Passenger capacity : 2,199

What is the biggest MSC Cruises ship?

The biggest MSC Cruises ship is MSC World Europa. At 215,863 gross tons, it's the biggest MSC Cruises ship ever built and the sixth biggest cruise ship in the world from any line.

Unveiled in the final days of 2022 (so close to year's end that we considered it a new vessel for 2023 when we listed the year's most exciting new ships ), MSC World Europa can hold up to 6,762 passengers — almost as many as can fit on Royal Caribbean's giant Oasis-class vessels, the world's largest cruise ships.

What is the smallest MSC Cruises ship?

The smallest MSC Cruises ships are MSC Armonia and its sister vessel MSC Sinfonia. Built with the same specifications, the two ships measure just 65,542 tons a piece — just a third the size of the biggest MSC Cruises ship (MSC World Europa).

Unveiled in 2001 and 2002, respectively, MSC Armonia and MSC Sinfonia are not only the smallest MSC Cruises ships but also the oldest MSC Cruises ships.

Because of their small size, MSC Armonia and MSC Sinfonia have fewer restaurants, bars and entertainment areas than the biggest MSC Cruises ships. They also don't have the big water parks that are common on newer MSC Cruises ships. For the most part, their top decks are lined only with pools, whirlpools and sunning areas, as is typical for ships built in the early 2000s.

Are bigger MSC Cruises ships coming?

Probably. MSC Cruises currently has three new cruise ships on order that are all sister vessels to the line's new MSC World Europa, the first ship in the line's new World class of ships. The line hasn't said for sure how big the vessels will be, but the second, third and fourth vessels in a series are typically at least as big or bigger than the first vessel in a series.

The first of the new ships to arrive will be MSC World America in 2025, which is scheduled to be deployed in Florida . Two more of the World-class vessels are scheduled for completion in 2026 and 2027.

The World-class vessels are being built at the giant Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard in St. Nazaire, France.

Related: The best destinations you can visit on an MSC Cruises ship

In addition to the above, MSC Group — the line's parent company — has announced plans for yet another class of big MSC Cruises ships to start arriving later this decade, though there have been few details released.

What's the difference between bigger and smaller MSC Cruises ships?

The biggest MSC Cruises ships have room for a lot more onboard venues and attractions than older MSC Cruises ships. That makes them more alluring for vacationers who prefer a big, bustling megaresort experience as opposed to a stay at a smaller resort.

On the biggest MSC Cruises ship, MSC World Europa, you'll find an almost unbelievable number of pools and hot tubs (six and 14, respectively). The watery offerings include an aquapark with multiple waterslides that integrate virtual reality technology. There is also a family sun deck.

In addition, MSC World Europa has 13 dining venues, including the new-for-the-line Chef's Garden Kitchen (an outlet focused on microgreens) and La Pescaderia, a traditional seafood grill with alfresco seating. In a twist, the ship has three separate buffet restaurants, each with its own ambiance.

Related: The ultimate guide to MSC Cruises

The smallest MSC Cruises ships are just a third the size of MSC World Europa and thus lack room for many of the larger ships' features. They have a much more intimate feel, at least in the pantheon of relatively big, mass-market ships, and they hold far fewer people.

While the new MSC World Europa can hold nearly 7,000 people with every berth filled, the line's four oldest vessels (known as the Lirica class) are only designed to carry about 2,700 passengers with every berth filled.

MSC Cruises' smallest ships are a good choice for someone who wants to try MSC Cruises but isn't eager to travel with huge crowds. The smallest ships in the MSC Cruises fleet thus appeal to a subset of Royal Caribbean fans who prefer more intimacy in a cruise vessel and don't mind giving up some onboard amenities to get it. They are also often less expensive to sail on, on a per-day basis.

Related: Don't miss out on these MSC Cruises loyalty perks

In addition, because of their size, the smallest MSC Cruises ships are able to operate itineraries to places that aren't as easy for big ships to visit. Not all ports in the world can handle a ship the size of MSC World Europa.

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Cleaning up cruise ship for 6,000 new people — in 1 day

The mind-boggling logistics of restocking and cleaning the Oasis of the Seas between Caribbean cruises.

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Once a week, after touring the Caribbean, the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas, one of the world’s largest, calls into its home port in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for what is called “turnaround day.”

Just as an airplane makes money only when it is flying, keeping a cruise ship out at sea is essential for its profitability. But instead of turning over a few hundred airline passengers, this ship offloads 6,000 people, takes on new supplies and welcomes 6,000 more travelers — all in under 12 hours.

Logistics are essential on turnaround day, at once the first and last day of a cruise, and the busiest time for the ship’s 2,140 crew members. Oasis docks at about 6 a.m. and leaves by 4:30 p.m. In that time, more than 12,000 bags need to get off the ship, food must be stocked, beds made and bathrooms cleaned. Getting everything ready in time is part NASCAR pit stop, part loading of Noah’s Ark.

“Embarkation day is frantic,” said Rodolfo Corrales, the ship’s provision master, whose job is to keep the vessel fully stocked for its journey. “It’s not just busy, it’s crazy busy.”

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Born in the 1970s, the modern cruise industry now counts more than 400 ships offering cruises tailored to many budgets and whims — from luxury ships sailing the Mediterranean Sea to mass-market holidays in the Caribbean Sea, still the most popular voyage for cruisers. Last year, more than 17 million passengers took a North American cruise, up from 7 million in 2000, according to the Cruise Lines International Association.

The Oasis, which is owned by Royal Caribbean, caters to middle-class vacationers — there is a casino, an aqua-theater for highflying diving acts, and a Broadway-style production of “Cats” — and on a recent turnaround day during the winter high season, the Oasis was packed with families, retirees and young couples looking for a break from the cold.

24,000 bottles of beer

Before heading for a seven-day cruise to the Bahamas, the Oasis needs to stock everything a small city might need. This includes 24,000 bottles of beer and 1,400 bottles of Champagne. The Oasis rarely picks up any provisions during the cruise, only topping up its fuel tanks while visiting ports.

Bread is baked onboard, and 2,000 tons of fresh water a day are produced through a reverse-osmosis desalination system. A treatment system handles all the wastewater generated by the passengers and crew. That system, which processes 1,200 tons of wastewater a day, uses bacteria to break down waste, then mechanical and chemical systems to remove solids, and finally ultraviolet light to disinfectant. The water at the end is clean enough to drink, but is discarded in the sea. Any remaining solids are held in special tanks to dry and be incinerated.

Almost all trash is recycled aboard or repurposed. Bottles, cans and compost are crushed and frozen in cold-temperature rooms to prevent the spread of bacteria. Engine heat is used to heat laundry-room water and showers; air-conditioning condensation is also used as a source for laundry water.

Standing near one of the cargo doors on the dock, Lincoln Brooks, the ship’s inventory manager, keeps an eye on the clock. Around him is a jumble of trucks, forklifts and carts all moving at a steady clip. Every step is timed to avoid bottlenecks inside the narrow galleys as two dozen cold storage rooms slowly fill up with fresh vegetables, including 15,000 pounds of potatoes, 9,000 pounds of tomatoes and about 9,000 soda cans.

“I need to keep things moving,” he said. “I can’t afford for the captain to call me.” Rain can make work more hazardous and slow things down, but this was a crisp morning, and Brooks seemed relaxed.

The countdown before sailing started deep inside the ship, as well. A small legion of workers hustled along the main artery, a service corridor known as I-95 that runs nearly the length of the ship and allows fast access to any section.

Royal Caribbean has built the largest cruise ship terminal at Port Everglades, in Fort Lauderdale, to handle the flow of passengers from Oasis and its twin, the Allure. To prevent long immigration-control lines from forming, departures are staggered over a few hours.

Getting the bags off

Passengers begin to leave their cabins about 7 a.m. and must be off the ship by 10:30 a.m. The main bottleneck is juggling the flow of bags. Passengers are handed color-coded tags for their luggage, which is collected the night before the ship reaches the port.

About 15 to 30 minutes after the last passenger leaves, newcomers start trickling in through one of two gangways linked to the terminal ashore.

Packing in passengers has been a winning formula for the business. (Until Oasis went into dry dock for a two-week maintenance last year, it had been in service for more than 1,800 days, or five straight years.)

Royal Caribbean, which has the world’s three largest cruise ships, doubled its revenue in the last decade to $8 billion last year. And profit per passenger has risen, as well, to $148 last year from $136 10 years ago. The company is also moving away from traditional, all-inclusive formulas to offering services and amenities for an extra cost. About a third of its revenue now comes from selling items during port visits or sales onboard — Wi-Fi access, for example. Passengers can pay up to $400 to connect two devices for seven days to download movies or make Skype calls from the middle of the ocean.

A few years ago, Royal Caribbean brought in experts in industrial productivity, including DHL and the German carmaker Porsche, to help manage complex flows on the ship. As an example, the efficiency experts helped determine where to locate waiter stations in the main dining room to reduce the number of footsteps needed to serve hundreds of diners simultaneously.

“We have everything down to a fine art,” said Martin Rissley, the ship’s hotel director. “The minute efficiencies you can create in the process make a big difference in the end.”

Vast laundry

Down in the lowest decks, the laundry room quickly filled up with dirty linen, with bags lining hallways and piling up in corners. By the end of the day, the crew washed 93,000 pounds of laundry. Bedsheets are folded automatically in presses. But 29,000 towels are folded by hand.

Crew members, who come from all over the world (many are from the Philippines), work long shifts. Some will stay onboard for four months at a time and work seven days a week, taking short breaks during the day, then head home for a two-month rest period. It can be grueling and repetitive work. Eight butchers, for instance, spend the cruise chopping up 25,000 pounds of meat each week, working in two shifts of four.

This obsession with detail and planning has become necessary as cruise ships get ever bigger. But risks also come with size. An engine fire on the Carnival Triumph two years ago crippled the ship at sea for several days. Toilets clogged, food perished, and passengers slept on decks to avoid the stench in their cabins.

Carnival has since fitted its ships with emergency generators to avoid another similar mishap. But the ship’s plight turned off many would-be cruisers, and bookings dropped industrywide. Cameras aboard helicopters showed images of makeshift tents on the pool deck, and passengers described their ordeal in apocalyptic terms.

“It’s like being locked in a Porta-Potty for days,” one passenger, Peter Cass, a physician from Beaumont, Texas, said at the time. “We’ve lived through two hurricanes, and this is worse.”

The hazards were also apparent in January 2012 when the Costa Concordia, also owned by Carnival, ran aground off the coast of Italy after its captain steered it off course, and then delayed evacuating the ship when it hit rocks by the island of Giglio. Thirty-two people died. The captain, Francesco Schettino, was convicted of manslaughter and abandoning the ship with passengers onboard.

Accidents bring action

“These accidents were definitely a wake-up call for the industry,” said Henry Harteveldt, founder of the Atmosphere Research Group, a travel industry research firm. “Cruise companies learned the hard way, and many of the newer ships now have redundancies built in them.”

Harri Kulovaara, Royal Caribbean’s chief naval architect, acknowledges that larger ships have challenges. Royal Caribbean had to come up with new lifeboats that could fit as many as 370 passengers, instead of 180, because adding enough smaller vessels would have taken too much hull space.

But Kulovaara, who is considered one of the industry’s most innovative architects, said that bigger ships also provided safety features. Thanks to its width, Oasis remains stable while cruising, even in bad weather. The ship is powered by six huge engines — each about the size of a school bus — that can produce extra power when encountering strong crosswinds as it enters a port, for instance.

Most important, its engines are housed in two separate rooms and can be operated independently if needed. This redundancy, common in new Royal Caribbean ships for more than a decade, became the norm for new cruise ships after the Triumph episode.

“We never set out to build the biggest ships in the world,” Kulovaara said. “Size creates certain challenges, of course. But the driver is really what is giving us a unique design and a unique vacation for our guests.”

One of Oasis’ most distinctive features is an open-air atrium that runs down the middle of the ship. It allows sunlight to come inside the vessel, enabling some inside cabins to have balconies. Those cabins can be sold at a premium. Prices for a seven-night cruise in March vary from $1,109 per person for an interior room (without windows) to $2,999 per person for a suite.

Soon, the Oasis will depart. Weather is the main cause of delays and can have ripple effects on future cruises. For instance, when fog recently delayed a ship from docking in Tampa, Florida, for more than a day, Royal Caribbean mobilized a “war room” of staff members onshore to rebook flights for delayed passengers and find accommodations for more than 3,000 people who were waiting for their ship to show up.

The last passengers trickle in and visitors leave, including the piano tuner who boards every two weeks to work on the ship’s five grand pianos. At 4:30 p.m., the odyssey begins again.

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Carnival Celebration ship commences first Caribbean cruise season

CCL-Carnival Cruise Line ’s newest flagship Carnival Celebration kicked off her first-ever sailing to the Caribbean. 

The 6000-passenger vessel made its first call at Grand Turk Island on a Thanksgiving-week voyage. 

That was followed by calls at Amber Cove (Dominicana) and Nassau (Bahamas) . 

Christine Duffy (CCL's President) said it was an honor to bring their new flagship to Grand Turk as its first Caribbean port of call and welcome guests to experience the beauty of the island.

“Grand Turk is a popular destination with our guests and I’m looking forward to Carnival Celebration making many memorable visits going forward.”

The new Carnival Celebration has 18 decks , 2641 staterooms , 20 dining venues, and will operate alternating itineraries across the Eastern and Western Caribbean. 

The boat's debut helps CCL to mark the company's 50th anniversary. 

That will include visits to destinations like Amber Cove, Grand Turk, Nassau, San Juan Puerto Rico , St. Maarten , and St Thomas USVI in the Eastern Caribbean and Costa Maya , Cozumel , and Mahogany Bay Jamaica in the Western Caribbean. 

Carnival Celebration held a major celebration in PortMiami Florida USA before setting off, which included a delegation from the CTO-Caribbean Tourism Organization. 

Winter is here! Check out the winter wonderlands at these 5 amazing winter destinations in Montana

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How Many Passengers Does The Biggest Cruise Ship Hold

Published: December 15, 2023

Modified: December 28, 2023

by Catherina Ruggiero

• Travel Guide

Introduction

Welcome aboard the world of cruising, where luxury and entertainment meet the vastness of the open sea. For travelers seeking a unique and unforgettable vacation experience, cruise ships offer a perfect blend of relaxation, adventure, and exploration. With their grandiose size and impressive amenities, modern cruise ships have become floating cities, catering to the needs and desires of thousands of passengers. In this article, we will delve into the world of colossal cruise ships and explore how many passengers they can hold.

Cruise ships have come a long way since their humble beginnings. From the pioneering ocean liners of the early 20th century to the state-of-the-art vessels of today, they have continuously evolved to create an exceptional cruising experience. From gourmet dining options and world-class entertainment to luxurious spas and thrilling onboard activities, cruise ships provide a myriad of amenities to keep passengers entertained throughout their voyage.

So, just how many passengers can these mammoth vessels accommodate? Well, the passenger capacity of a cruise ship can vary significantly based on several factors, including its size, layout, stateroom configurations, and onboard facilities. Larger ships tend to have a higher passenger capacity, as they have more space to accommodate various amenities and entertainment options.

When it comes to the largest cruise ship in the world, the title currently belongs to the awe-inspiring Symphony of the Seas, a part of Royal Caribbean’s Oasis Class of ships. This massive vessel can accommodate a staggering number of passengers, ensuring that there is never a shortage of excitement on board. Let’s take a closer look at the Symphony of the Seas and its extraordinary passenger capacity in the next section.

Overview of the world’s biggest cruise ships

In recent years, cruise lines have been engaged in a friendly competition to build the largest and most luxurious cruise ships in the world. These magnificent vessels boast multiple decks, elegant interiors, and an array of amenities that rival five-star resorts. Let’s take a brief look at some of the biggest cruise ships that have captured the imaginations of travelers worldwide.

• Symphony of the Seas: With a length of 1,188 feet and a weight of over 228,000 tons, Symphony of the Seas is currently the largest cruise ship in the world. This Royal Caribbean ship offers an incredible array of entertainment options, including 25 dining venues, 23 swimming pools, a zip line, a full-sized basketball court, and a casino.
• Oasis of the Seas: Another member of the Royal Caribbean’s Oasis Class, Oasis of the Seas measures approximately 1,187 feet in length and can carry over 6,000 passengers. This ship features Central Park, an open-air area with lush greenery, as well as an ice rink, a carousel, and a 1,380-seat theater.
• Allure of the Seas: Like its sister ship, Oasis of the Seas, Allure of the Seas is a part of Royal Caribbean’s Oasis Class. It measures about 1,187 feet and can accommodate over 6,000 passengers. Onboard, passengers can enjoy the thrilling zip line, numerous pools and hot tubs, Broadway-style shows, and a wide variety of dining options.
• Harmony of the Seas: Harmony of the Seas, also a member of the Oasis Class, spans approximately 1,188 feet and can hold more than 6,600 passengers. This ship offers innovative features such as the Ultimate Abyss, a 10-story slide, an AquaTheater for live performances, and a Central Park with over 12,000 live plants.
• MSC Meraviglia: MSC Meraviglia, operated by MSC Cruises, is one of the largest ships in the world, measuring around 1,034 feet in length. It can accommodate over 5,700 passengers and boasts an exclusive Mediterranean-style promenade, a water park, a full-size bowling alley, and a wide array of specialty restaurants.

These extraordinary cruise ships offer a multitude of lavish amenities and entertainment options, ensuring that passengers have a remarkable experience while sailing the seas. From world-class dining and thrilling water slides to Broadway-quality shows and luxurious spas, these mega-ships combine leisure and adventure to create unforgettable memories for travelers of all ages.

Now, let’s delve deeper into the factors that influence the passenger capacity of these colossal cruise ships.

Factors influencing the passenger capacity

The passenger capacity of a cruise ship is not solely determined by its size. Many factors come into play when calculating how many passengers a ship can hold. Let’s explore some of the key factors that influence the passenger capacity of these massive vessels.

Ship Size: Unsurprisingly, the size of a cruise ship plays a significant role in determining its passenger capacity. Larger ships have the advantage of having more space to accommodate various amenities and staterooms, allowing for a higher number of passengers on board. However, it’s important to strike a balance between size and maneuverability, ensuring that the ship can navigate different ports and waterways.

Layout and Design: The layout and design of a cruise ship also impact its passenger capacity. Ships with well-planned and efficient layouts can maximize the number of staterooms, public areas, and amenities, accommodating more passengers. Clever use of space and thoughtful architecture can help create a comfortable and spacious environment for travelers.

Stateroom Configurations: The types and sizes of staterooms available on a cruise ship can vary significantly. From compact interior cabins to expansive suites, there is a wide range of accommodations to cater to different budgets and preferences. The mix of staterooms affects the overall passenger capacity, as smaller rooms can accommodate more guests, while larger suites may have a lower occupancy limit.

Amenities and Facilities: Cruise ships are renowned for their extensive range of amenities and facilities. From restaurants and bars to pools and spas, these onboard features contribute to the overall passenger capacity. Additional dining venues, entertainment spaces, and recreational facilities can accommodate more passengers, ensuring that everyone has a variety of options to enjoy during their voyage.

Safety Regulations: Passenger safety is of utmost importance on cruise ships, and safety regulations can impact the maximum capacity of a vessel. Evacuation protocols, lifeboat capacity, and emergency exits are some of the factors that determine the maximum number of passengers a ship can carry safely in case of an emergency.

Crew-to-Passenger Ratio: The number of crew members onboard also affects the overall passenger capacity. Adequate staff is required to provide excellent service, maintain cleanliness, and ensure passenger safety. The size of the crew and their assigned duties must be taken into account when determining the maximum number of passengers a ship can accommodate.

By considering all these factors, cruise lines carefully design and construct their ships to optimize passenger capacity while maintaining the utmost safety and comfort for their guests. The next section will focus on the Symphony of the Seas, the current holder of the title for the world’s largest passenger ship, and its remarkable capacity.

The largest cruise ship: Symphony of the Seas

When it comes to the largest cruise ship in the world, the Symphony of the Seas, from Royal Caribbean International’s Oasis Class, takes the crown. This phenomenal vessel, which made its debut in 2018, boasts an impressive passenger capacity that ensures an unforgettable experience for thousands of holidaymakers.

The Symphony of the Seas stretches an astonishing 1,188 feet in length and weighs over 228,000 tons. It encompasses an array of amazing features and amenities, allowing passengers to indulge in the ultimate cruising experience. The ship offers a wide selection of accommodations, from interior and ocean-view staterooms to luxurious suites with private balconies and exclusive perks.

Onboard, passengers can explore a multitude of thrilling activities and entertainment options. The ship features 25 dining venues, ranging from casual cafés to exquisite specialty restaurants serving mouthwatering international cuisines. Whether passengers crave a juicy steak, an authentic Italian pasta dish, or fresh seafood, Symphony of the Seas has something to delight every palate.

For those seeking excitement, the ship offers an abundance of thrills. Passengers can zip line across the open-air Boardwalk, challenge themselves on the FlowRider surf simulator, or take a plunge down one of the tallest slides at sea. Adventure-seekers can also try their luck at the ship’s exciting casino or engage in a friendly game of basketball on the full-sized court.

When it comes to entertainment, Symphony of the Seas raises the bar. Guests can enjoy mesmerizing productions at the Royal Theater, showcasing Broadway-quality shows, or be dazzled by the high-flying acrobatics and aquatic performances at the AquaTheater. The ship also houses a vibrant nightlife scene, with numerous bars, clubs, and lounges, where passengers can dance the night away or unwind with a refreshing cocktail.

Furthermore, Symphony of the Seas offers a wide range of amenities and facilities for relaxation and rejuvenation. From luxurious spa treatments and tranquil adult-only pools to expansive sun decks for soaking up the rays, passengers can find the perfect spot to unwind and enjoy breathtaking views of the ocean.

With its exceptional passenger capacity, Symphony of the Seas can accommodate over 6,700 guests, including both adults and children. This ensures that there is ample space for everyone to enjoy the ship’s numerous features and activities. The ship’s size and diverse offerings make it an ideal choice for families, groups, and individuals looking to embark on a truly remarkable cruise vacation.

Now that we’ve explored Symphony of the Seas and its extraordinary capacity, let’s compare its passenger capacity with other leading cruise liners in the next section.

Passenger capacity comparison with other leading cruise liners

When it comes to cruising, size matters. As cruise lines continue to push the boundaries of ship design and engineering, the passenger capacity of these floating marvels continues to increase. Let’s compare the passenger capacity of Symphony of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, with some other notable players in the industry.

As mentioned earlier, Symphony of the Seas, from Royal Caribbean International’s Oasis Class, can accommodate over 6,700 passengers. This massive ship offers plenty of space and amenities to ensure that every guest has a fantastic vacation experience.

On the other hand, Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas, both belonging to the same Oasis Class as Symphony, have a similar passenger capacity, surpassing the 6,000 mark. These sister ships provide an abundance of activities, dining options, and entertainment venues to cater to the needs of their guests.

Harmony of the Seas, another member of the Oasis Class fleet, can carry over 6,600 passengers. This ship offers similar amenities to Symphony of the Seas, including the thrilling Ultimate Abyss slide and the mesmerizing AquaTheater.

MSC Meraviglia, operated by MSC Cruises, is also one of the largest ships in the world. With a passenger capacity of over 5,700, it offers a wide range of entertainment, dining, and relaxation options. Its exclusive Mediterranean-style promenade is a unique feature that sets it apart.

When comparing these impressive passenger capacities, it’s clear that the size and onboard offerings of these mega-ships have allowed cruise lines to accommodate thousands of guests at a time. These large capacities not only cater to the growing demand for cruising but also provide ample opportunities for travelers to meet new people, participate in various activities, and explore different dining options during their journey.

It’s important to note that while these ships have high passenger capacities, cruise lines also prioritize creating spacious and comfortable environments for guests. They carefully design the ships, ensuring that the layout and amenities are optimized to avoid overcrowding and ensure a pleasant experience for everyone on board.

Now that we have explored the passenger capacity of some leading cruise liners, let’s step inside the ships and discover the remarkable facilities and amenities they offer to their passengers.

Inside the ship: Facilities and amenities for passengers

Stepping inside a modern cruise ship is like entering a world of endless possibilities. These floating cities are designed to provide passengers with a wide range of facilities and amenities, ensuring that there’s never a dull moment during their voyage. Let’s explore some of the remarkable features you can find inside these magnificent ships.

Dining options: One of the highlights of any cruise is the delectable dining experiences on offer. From elegant main dining rooms serving gourmet cuisine to specialty restaurants showcasing international flavors, cruise ships offer an array of culinary delights. Passengers can indulge in mouthwatering dishes inspired by different cultures and regions, ensuring there’s something to satisfy every palate.

Onboard entertainment: Cruise ships are known for their exceptional entertainment options. Passengers can enjoy Broadway-style shows in grand theaters, featuring talented performers and stunning production values. From high-flying acrobatic performances to live music and comedy acts, there’s entertainment for every taste and age group. Some ships even have movie theaters, planetariums, and virtual reality gaming zones to keep passengers entertained throughout their journey.

Recreation and activities: Cruise ships offer a plethora of recreational activities to cater to every interest. From water parks with thrilling slides and swimming pools to sports facilities like basketball courts and rock climbing walls, there’s no shortage of excitement on board. Passengers can also enjoy activities like cooking classes, dance lessons, art workshops, and even wine tastings, ensuring there’s something for everyone to enjoy.

Relaxation and wellness: Cruise ships provide a range of facilities for relaxation and rejuvenation. Passengers can unwind in luxurious spas, offering a variety of treatments such as massages, facials, and aromatherapy. Many ships also feature fitness centers equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, fitness classes, and jogging tracks for those who want to stay active during their vacation.

Family-friendly amenities: Cruise ships go above and beyond to ensure that families have a fantastic time on board. Many ships have dedicated children’s clubs and teen lounges, offering age-appropriate activities and supervised play areas. Kids can enjoy treasure hunts, arts and crafts, video game tournaments, and even meet their favorite characters. Meanwhile, adults can take advantage of adult-only pools, bars, and quiet retreats for some peaceful relaxation.

Shopping and boutiques: Cruise ships often feature shopping areas and boutiques where passengers can indulge in some retail therapy. From duty-free shops selling jewelry, luxury goods, and fashion to onboard boutiques featuring designer brands, there’s plenty of opportunity to find the perfect souvenir or treat yourself to something special.

Outdoor spaces: Cruise ships provide ample outdoor spaces for passengers to soak up the sun and enjoy breathtaking views. From expansive sun decks with loungers to promenades lined with shops and cafés, passengers can relax and take in the beauty of the ocean while enjoying the ship’s amenities.

These are just a few examples of the numerous facilities and amenities cruise ships offer. Whether you’re seeking relaxation, adventure, entertainment, or indulgence, these floating resorts provide a wealth of options to ensure an unforgettable experience for every passenger.

Cruise ships have truly revolutionized the way we travel, offering a unique and unforgettable vacation experience on the high seas. From the world’s largest cruise ship, Symphony of the Seas, to other colossal vessels, these floating cities provide a breathtaking array of facilities and amenities for passengers.

With their impressive size and meticulous design, cruise ships can accommodate thousands of passengers at a time while ensuring a comfortable and enjoyable environment. Factors such as ship size, layout, stateroom configurations, and onboard amenities all play a role in determining the passenger capacity of these magnificent vessels.

The largest cruise ships in the world, such as Symphony of the Seas and its sister ships Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas, can accommodate over 6,000 passengers. These ships offer an abundance of dining options, entertainment venues, and recreational activities to cater to every passenger’s desires.

While size matters, cruise liners also prioritize creating spacious and comfortable environments to avoid overcrowding. Passengers can look forward to enjoying world-class dining experiences, captivating entertainment shows, thrilling activities, relaxing spa treatments, and much more during their voyage.

Cruise ships are a haven for families, groups, and individuals seeking adventure, relaxation, and exploration. With their diverse amenities, there is something to entertain and delight every age and interest. Whether you’re seeking high-energy excitement or tranquil serenity, these ships offer an extraordinary array of experiences for everyone.

As cruise lines continue to innovate and push the boundaries of ship design, the passenger capacity of these floating marvels will continue to rise. The future holds even greater possibilities for travelers, as cruise ships become more technologically advanced and offer even more impressive features.

So, if you’re dreaming of the perfect vacation that combines luxurious accommodations, exceptional dining, thrilling entertainment, and the vastness of the open sea, a cruise ship awaits you. Set sail on one of these colossal vessels and embark on a remarkable journey that will create memories to last a lifetime.

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Disney Cruise Line Finalizes Purchase of Mega-Ship, the Global Dream

• by John Frost
• November 16, 2022 December 14, 2022

Update : According to news outlet capital.de, Disney Cruise Lines paid roughly $42 million for the Global Dream mega cruise ship. That’s a massive discount of 97% below what the ship was originally projected to cost.

The ship is only 75% complete though, Disney is projected to spend more than $900 million finishing the ship. Captain Mickey and team will have to add in DCL’s famous level of detail and rework some of the top-deck features that weren’t targeting Disney’s typical audience of passengers.

Disney is also expected to convert some of the staterooms into other spaces as the announced guest capacity for the ship was 6,000 but the Global Dream was originally planned to host 9,000 guests.

What sort of features would you like to see on the Global Dream when it sails again, with a new name, in 2025?

Original story below

In order to expand the Disney Cruise Line vacation experience to new international locations, Disney has been negotiating to acquire a mega cruise ship that was only about 75% complete when the original company went bankrupt. The cruise ship then known as the Global Dream will be finished in Wismar, Germany, by Disney and the prestigious Meyer Werft shipbuilding business.

“Our cruise ships give us the unique opportunity to bring Disney magic to fans no matter where they are, and the addition of this ship will make a Disney Cruise Line vacation accessible to more families than ever before,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman, Disney Parks, Experiences and Products.

As the company that was building the ship went into insolvency, Disney was able to get a good deal from the creditors. So even with the cost of expected upgrades and new finishes, it will be a quick and affordable way to bring the Disney fleet to 6 ships.

Disney is working with Meyer Werft to complete the construction at that MV Werften shipyard in Wismar, Germany. Meyer Werft is the Papenburg-based company that built the Disney Dream, Disney Fantasy and Disney Wish and is scheduled to build two sister ships to the Disney Wish.

The ship will be given a new name and have some of its features redesigned by the world-famous Walt Disney Imagineers. As you can see in the concept art above, the exterior will be adorned in the iconic, Mickey Mouse-inspired colors of the fleet, complete with signature red funnels.

Some of the original concept art for the Global Dream reveal that the top deck was originally planned to be very much like an amusement park at sea, which would be a big departure from the Disney Cruise Line experience, so we expect a lot of changes to happen there.

Plus Disney Cruise Lines are known for their interior theming and attention to detail when it comes to the guest experience from the cabin and its furnishings to things like carpeting and those character based touches.

Disney Cruise Line expects the passenger capacity to be approximately 6,000 with around 2,300 crew members. The Disney Dream, Fantasy, and Wish currently hold around 4,000 passengers. At a huge 208,000 gross tonnage that would make this ship the 7th largest cruise ship world-wide if it were sailing today.

The new ship, which Disney plans to base outside of the United States, will be updated to include Disney quality experiences along with the usual dazzling entertainment, world-class dining and legendary guest service that guests expect from Disney Cruise Line.

The ship was originally intended for the waters of China and The Walt Disney Company has expressed interest in finding a home port for one of its ships closer to its patrons in nations like Japan and China. So that would be our guess as to a final destination.

The ship will be among the first in the cruise industry to be fueled by green methanol, one of the lowest emission fuels available. While it’s not emission free, perhaps Disney will buy carbon offsets to make it a net-zero carbon ship. That would be great for the battle against climate change.

Disney has said the new ship is scheduled to set sail in 2025.

Previously : Disney rumored to be rescuing Global Dream after company building it went bankrupt .

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Carnival Corporation Says 6,000 Passengers Are Currently Stranded at Sea on its Cruise Ships

Mackenzie Schmidt is the Home and Travel Editor for PEOPLE. She's worked at PEOPLE for over five years as a writer and editor on the Lifestyle team.

Carnival Corporation confirmed on Tuesday that thousands of passengers are still stranded at sea on its cruise ships amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The corporation , which is the parent company of major cruise lines including Carnival, Princess and Holland America, disclosed the information in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. They stated “there are approximately 6,000 passengers onboard ships still at sea.”

And those passengers may still have four weeks of isolation ahead, as they “are expected to disembark . . . by the end of April.”

It was not immediately clear how many different ships those passengers are aboard, but a representative for the company tells PEOPLE, “We expect to have three ships at sea by the end of this week.”“The ships that remain at sea were primarily longer cruises, including some world cruises,” the rep adds. None of the ships still at sea belong to their largest U.S. brand, Carnival Cruise Line.

Numerous cruise ships have been turned away from international ports in recent weeks due to expanding travel restrictions and in several instances, confirmed cases of COVID-19 — or fears of potential illness — on board.

Princess Cruise Lines’ Diamond Princess and Grand Princess ships, and Holland America’s MS Zaandam, which are all owned by Carnival Corp., have experienced the worst outbreaks to date.

In the case of the Diamond Princess, a total of 621 people eventually tested positive for the virus and seven former passengers have now died , according to Reuters . Twenty-one people tested positive on the Grand Princess, “some of whom subsequently died due to the disease,” Carnival Corp. said.

The MS Zaandam, which is currently en route to Ft. Lauderdale after being stuck in limbo for over a week following port closures in South America, has had four deaths on board and 189 passengers and crew reporting flu-like symptoms as of Monday night.

Four more of their owned ships also had confirmed coronavirus cases on board in the last two months.

“Numerous passengers and crew on . . .Costa Luminosa, Ruby Princess, Costa Magica and Costa Favolosa, have been diagnosed with COVID-19,” they stated, adding that “Costa Magica and Costa Favolosa are currently working with the U.S. Coast Guard to facilitate medical evacuations.” Both of those ships are now anchored near the port of Miami.

They also noted that even once everyone is on dry land, “Some of our crew is unable to return home, and we will be providing them with food and housing.”

The company, like much of the travel industry, has taken a massive hit amid the pandemic. The SEC filing was to issue $6 billion in stock in order to hopefully shore up its finances, but, it allows, the future is uncertain and the suspension of all planned voyages will likely be extended.

“Each brand has separately announced the duration of its pause, but we expect such pauses to be extended (and some extensions have already been announced),” the filing reads. Its flagship carrier, Carnival Cruise Line, has already cancelled cruises until mid-May.

In the meantime, the company is spending an enormous amount of money, while not embarking on any voyages.

Ship and administrative operating costs (including maintaining its empty ships in storage), refunding the deposits of customers canceling trips, and “COVID-related costs associated with sanitizing our ships and defending lawsuits,” among many other expenses tally to “approximately, on average, $1 billion per month,” according to the document.

In 2019, Carnival Corporation had a net income of $2.99 billion, the filing details. This year, it said, “We expect a net loss.”

WATCH THIS: Coronavirus Myths Debunked: Pathogens Expert Says ‘The Fact Speaks For Itself’

On March 13, the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) — a trade organization that represents Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Disney, Princess, Holland America and many more— shared that in observance of government health recommendations and travel restrictions, its members would voluntarily stop new cruises from departing at midnight on March 14, and all ships already at sea would make their way home.

At the time, 40 cruise ships carrying 90,000 passengers were in the middle of their planned itineraries around the world, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agency released a timeline for their safe return: 11 of the ships were to complete their sailings and get back to port by March 16. The remaining 29 were to do so by March 30.

As of the deadline Monday night, however, CLIA confirmed to PEOPLE that 3.6% percent of its 277 member vessels had not yet made it back, meaning approximately 10 ships with passengers on board are still at sea. Another five are docked but cannot yet disembark.

Before the industry-wide decision to voluntarily halt sailings was reached, many cruise lines were proceeding with voyages as planned amid warnings from the CDC and U.S. State Department that citizens, particularly those in compromised health, “ should not travel by cruise ship ” at this time.

As information about the coronavirus pandemic rapidly changes, PEOPLE is committed to providing the most recent data in our coverage. Some of the information in this story may have changed after publication. For the latest on COVID-19, readers are encouraged to use online resources from CDC , WHO , and local public health departments and visit our coronavirus hub .

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List: Every Cruise Ship Ranked By Space Per Passenger (Find Your Ship)

Which cruise ships have the most space per passenger?

Head to any cruise line website or look at any brochure, and you’re sure to see people having fun on the ship… but noticeably absent are any other passengers. Anyone that’s sailed before knows the reality is far different.

Today’s modern ships can carry upwards of 5,000 people at double occupancy (two passengers to every cabin) and even more when completely full.

And while not everywhere on the ship is packed — there are still plenty of places to get away from the crowd — many spots will have plenty of people.

So what if you want to sail with the most space possible?

Calculating the Most Space Per Passenger for More Than 100+ Cruise Ships

There’s no arguing that over the past decade or two cruise ships have become significantly larger. About 20 years ago, a “large” cruise ship might come in at 70,000-90,000 gross tons (a measurement of a ship’s size).

Today, the bigger ships start around 140,000 gross tons.

The number of passengers continues to increase as well. An older ship might carry “just” 2,000 to 3,000 passengers. Numbers today are double that.

But just because a ship carries more passengers doesn’t mean it’s more crowded. Remember, the overall size has gone up as well meaning more space on the ship.

Still there are definitely some ships that carry more or fewer passengers than other ships of their size. The result? You can sail a ship that offers more (sometimes considerably) more space per passenger. If you’re a fan of having a little more elbow room on your cruise, selecting those ships with a larger “space ratio” — the ratio between a ship’s tonnage compared to the number of passengers — can be a smart move.

That’s why we calculated this ratio for more than 100 cruise ships across multiple lines. This will give you a better idea of which ships may feel more relaxed and which may feel more crowded. The higher the ratio, the greater the size of the ship on a per-passenger basis . Conversely, the smaller ratios mean that the ship is smaller per passenger.

You can search the table below to rank the ships based on size, passengers, or space ratio, and even search for specific ships. 

There are a couple of things you should know about this table. First, just like any resort, every cruise ship has its own design style. Some are built to be wide open, which can help them feel more spacious even if they are the same size and carry the same number of passengers as another ship.

Others look to be more cozy with smaller open spaces, which despite ample size per passenger overall, can make them feel more crowded.

In other words, more goes into the "feel" of the spaciousness of a cruise ship than just its overall tonnage compared to number of passengers. Design matters too.

Second, this ratio is calculated based on the double occupancy figures for the ship . Many ships, however, sail at more than double occupancy (meaning some rooms have 3+ passengers), so the ratio on your specific cruise may be slightly different than what's shown above.

The 10 Cruise Ships With the Most Size Per Passenger

Looking for the most room per passenger on your next cruise? Ships that have a space ratio of 40 or more are a good place to start. However, if you want the best of the best, then we suggest looking at those with a ratio above 43.

In our list of more than 100 ships, only 16 (around 15%) of ships meet this benchmark. The ships at the top of the list include Norwegian Cruise Line's newest ships -- Prima and Viva -- which come in at 142,500 gross tons and carry 3,100 passengers at double occupancy. That equates to a space ratio of 46.

But the overall winners are Disney ships, like the new Disney Wish. They top out with space ratios in the high 40s to high 50s. What you need to know here is that Disney's ship designs are a little different than other ships, which increases the space ratio.

While most ships are built with two passengers in mind for the cabin, Disney is obviously much more focused on families. That means ships are designed with more passengers in mind per cabin, reducing the double occupancy rate (which is just the number of cabins times two people).

With a lower double occupancy rate, the space ratio increases sharply. However, it's likely that you'll have significantly more passengers on the ship.

Here are the 10 cruise ships with the most space per passenger based on our calculations:

• Disney Wish (57.4)
• Disney Fantasy (52.0)
• Disney Dream (52.0)
• Disney Wonder (48.0)
• Disney Magic (48.0)
• Norwegian Prima (46.0)
• Norwegian Viva (46.0)
• Coral Princess (45.8)
• Icon of the Seas (44.7)
• Celebrity Apex (44.5)

The 10 Cruise Ships With the Least Size Per Passenger

When it comes to the ships with the least amount of size per passenger, one cruise line leads the list -- Carnival. In fact, all of the ships on our list with the smallest space ratios come from the cruise line.

In general, the space ratio for Carnival ships runs about 33-37 on average, including the lowest-ranking ship, Carnival Elation. That ship has a gross tonnage of nearly 72,000 and carries 2,190 passengers. That equals a space ratio of 32.8.

It also goes to show that newer, larger ships with more people don't automatically mean more crowded. Elation started sailing in 1998 and many larger ships built more recently have higher ratios.

Here are the 10 cruise ships with the least size per passenger based on our calculations:

• Carnival Elation (32.8)
• Carnival Firenze (32.8)
• Carnival Venezia (33.1)
• Carnival Panorama (33.3)
• Carnival Horizon (33.7)
• Carnival Paradise (33.9)
• Carnival Vista (33.9)
• Carnival Radiance (34.0)
• Carnival Sunrise (34.0)
• Carnival Celebration (34.1)

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Try looking at lines such as Seabourn or Silversea. These figures are really only mainstream and leave out some of the luxury lines.

Space Ratio’s are fake numbers! Gross Tonnage includes ALL the interior volume of the ship .. crew only areas, engines rooms, the works .. space that a passenger would never have access to.

What about the Cunard Queen Elizabeth ? At 90 400 tons and passenger count of 2116 , it’s space ratio is 42.7 thereby landing at 20th . Doesn’t Cunard count ?

In your space ratio list, you left out Holland America and Viking.

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Feeling Brave? MSC Debuts “Cliffhanger” — A Swing That Takes You 160 Ft. OVER the Water

What i wish i knew before visiting nassau on a cruise, hotels with cruise shuttles for every major port in america, 39 useful things to pack for your cruise (including 17 you’d never think of).

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Revealed: 6,000 passengers on cruise ships despite coronavirus crisis

Guardian analysis comes amid growing scrutiny of industry’s response to outbreak

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A t least 6,000 passengers remain at sea on cruise liners despite the coronavirus pandemic, Guardian analysis has found, amid growing scrutiny of the cruise industry’s reaction to the spread of Covid-19.

Dozens of fatalities have now been linked to cruise ships , with both passengers and crew dying while at sea and after disembarking. Yet, according to analysis using the ship-tracking site CruiseMapper, at least eight ships remain at sea with passengers – including one vessel on which 128 people have tested positive for coronavirus.

“Outbreaks of Covid-19 on cruise ships pose a risk for rapid spread of disease beyond the voyage,” the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warned in guidance prohibiting those disembarking from cruise ships from taking regular commercial flights. It listed 28 cruises that had reported Covid-19 outbreaks and used US ports.

Cruise industry representatives say they were caught “without warning” by the pandemic. But operators continued to launch cruises as late as mid-March – after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic – and companies have been accused of failing to disclose the scale of ship-born outbreaks before allowing passengers to disembark.

As far back as early February, outbreaks were detected on cruise ships. The Diamond Princess was quarantined in Japan on 4 February after an outbreak onboard which eventually claimed at least 10 lives.

At least six ships which had coronavirus outbreaks set sail from the US after the CDC advised against cruise travel on 8 March – including two that departed after the WHO’s pandemic declaration.

Around the world, the Pacific Princess, Queen Mary 2, Arcadia, Astor, Magnifica, Columbus, Costa Deliziosa and the Greg Mortimer cruise liners all remain at sea.

At least 6,362 passengers are onboard the eight ships, several of which were scheduled as months-long, round-the-world voyages.

On Saturday, Australian passengers are due to be repatriated from Uruguay after disembarking from the Greg Mortimer, an Antarctic cruise ship on which nearly two-thirds of passengers and crew have been infected with coronavirus .

Eight people have transferred to intensive care in Montevideo from the vessel which set sail on the day of the WHO pandemic declaration and has been anchored off La Plata river since 27 March after cutting the cruise short.

European and US passengers have been told they cannot disembark until two weeks after they have tested negative for the disease.

Brian Meier, 55, a businessman from Chicago, said the worst part of the experience has been the daily uncertainty regarding their fate. “Our mood goes up and down, because we are told there’s news coming – but then you wake up the next morning and there’s no news and by the time it gets dark again there’s still nothing,” he said via WhatsApp. There are currently no reports of Covid-19 on any of the other ships currently at sea. But the CDC has warned that thousands of passengers who had travelled on 28 cruises since 1 February may have been exposed to coronavirus.

Dr Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco, called on the US government to devise a plan to safely allow passengers on the remaining ships to disembark.

Having cruise ships “wandering the world right now” was “completely irresponsible”, he said.

The crisis has increased concerns about whether some cruise operators fully disclosed the scale of coronavirus outbreaks.

On Wednesday, a class action lawsuit was filed against Costa Cruise Lines, a subsidiary of Carnival, which operates the Costa Luminosa. At least seven people died after boarding the ship, and the suit – which has not yet been certified by a judge – alleges that the cruise should never have started on 5 March due to safety concerns about Covid-19.

In Australia, police in New South Wales have launched a criminal investigation into the conduct of Carnival Australia over whether the company was transparent about the scale of the Covid-19 outbreak on one of its cruise ships, the Ruby Princess.

Authorities said they had been assured by Carnival Australia that the disease had not been detected on the ship before it docked in Sydney on 19 March and hundreds of passengers were allowed to leave. The Ruby Princess became the country’s single largest source of Covid-19 cases in Australia, accounting for around a third of deaths.

In San Diego, the Celebrity Eclipse was allowed to unload about 2,300 passengers on 30 March after assuring port officials that there was no illness aboard the ship, which had been turned away from a port in Chile.

But a woman hospitalised immediately after leaving the ship tested positive for Covid-19. Her husband, David Nystrom, told local television in San Diego that the cruise ship’s dispensary had been overflowing with sick patients for a week.

“She had all the symptoms a week before that ship docked and many other people had the symptoms,” Nystrom said.

He said the ship’s medical bay “was standing room only. I would guess at least 50 people every day sitting in chairs waiting, people sweating, people coughing”. Royal Caribbean, the ship’s operator, did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Florida’s attorney general, Ashley Moody, has announced an investigation into whether sales pitches by Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) sought to downplay concerns about Covid-19 – in one case allegedly telling customers: “The coronavirus can only survive in cold temperatures, so the Caribbean is a fantastic choice for your next cruise.” NCL did not respond when contacted by the Guardian.

Passengers have also launched individual lawsuits. On Tuesday a couple who were infected on a cruise to Europe filed a suit against Costa Cruises in a US federal court.

Three passengers died and many were infected on the voyage of the Costa Luminosa, which left Florida on 5 March.

“This cruise never should have set sail from Fort Lauderdale in the first place because by 5 March 2020 the global cruise industry was well aware of the two Princess cruise ships that resulted in a massive outbreak of the virus and numerous deaths,” said Michael Winkleman, the attorney who filed the suit in a statement obtained by the Miami Herald .

Carnival Corporation, which owns Costa Cruises, Holland America Line and Carnival Australia, did not comment on specific allegations in this article.

But in a statement to the Guardian, the corporation said both it and its subsidiaries had taken “more precautions and actions than most”.

“We have only seven out of a fleet of 105 ships with guests who tested positive since last December, when the first case became public. Unlike some, we immediately took action and suspended our cruises in China and later in parts of Asia,” it said.

Cruise industry leaders have described the situations facing the stranded cruise ships as coming “without warning” from an unprecedented crisis.

“These travellers could have been any one of us or our families, unexpectedly caught in the middle of this unprecedented closure of global borders that happened in a matter of days and without warning,” said Orlando Ashford, the president of Holland America Line, after four died on its Zaandam cruise ship.

Cruise Lines International Association, the largest trade association for the industry, confirmed the Guardian’s figures on vessels still at sea and said: “Upon declaration by the WHO of a pandemic, CLIA member cruise lines voluntarily suspended operations worldwide – making the cruise industry one of the first to do so.”

But James Walker, a Florida attorney who specialises in cases involving cruise ship passengers, said the outbreaks on cruise ships around the world were “entirely predictable” given there was so little government oversight of the industry.

He said the cruise industry should have halted operations much sooner, and also criticised the US government’s response to the crisis.

“It’s been abysmal,” he said. “It seems out of control quite frankly. No one seems to have a plan.”

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Eight passengers stranded on African island after Norwegian cruise ship left without them

A dream cruise vacation has turned into a nightmare for eight passengers left stranded on the African island of São Tomé and Príncipe after their ship left without them because they were late to return from a private tour.

The tourists — six from the U.S. and two from Australia — were aboard the Norwegian Dawn, a Norwegian cruise line ship , which departed from Cape Town, South Africa, on March 20 for a 21-day voyage up the coast of Africa set to end in Barcelona, Spain, on April 10.

But on Wednesday, the group of eight tourists was late to return to the ship by more than an hour for the all-aboard time of 3 p.m. from a private excursion on the island, which was not organized by the cruise line.

Jay and Jill Campbell of South Carolina were part of the group that was left behind.

They said that their tour’s operator notified the cruise captain that they were going to be late to rejoin the ship and that the local Coast Guard tried to get them on the vessel but that they weren’t allowed to board.

As a result, the couple and the rest of the group have been stranded for days on the island off Nigeria, grappling with language, currency issues and complicated travel to catch up with the ship.

“The lovely people of São Tomé were very gracious, very hospitable. They had reached out as much as they could to help us find hotels,” Jay Campbell said on NBC's "TODAY" show Tuesday morning.

“We were able to get to a tour agency there to arrange flights to the next port of call. ... Very difficult process — you’re dealing with multiple languages, language barriers, you’re dealing with different currencies ... finding someone that even has dollars ... trying to get an agent to understand where we need to get to.

"It’s one of those ‘You can’t get there from here,’" he added.

A Norwegian spokesperson called the incident a “very unfortunate situation” and said, “Guests are responsible for ensuring they return to the ship at the published time.”

The cruise line said that after the guests failed to return, their passports were delivered to local port agents, in line with protocol. The company said it was working with local authorities to understand “the requirements and visas needed for the guests to reboard the ship at the next available port of call.”

On Monday, the guests had made arrangements to rejoin the ship in Banjul, Gambia, but the ship was unable to safely dock there because of “adverse weather conditions” and “tidal restrictions,” Norwegian said. The guests were then contacted and provided with information to rejoin the ship at Dakar, Senegal, on Tuesday. 

Jill Campbell said they traveled through seven countries in 48 hours to arrive in Senegal on Monday night.

But the couple was reconsidering whether they even wanted to return to the cruise.

"We are considering whether or not we are going to board the ship. It is in dock here in Senegal," she said. "We believe there was a basic duty of care that they had forgotten about, so it does concern us."

"After what we witnessed, we truly believe that although there’s a set of rules or policies that the ship may have followed, they followed those rules too rigidly. I believe that they really forgot that they are people working in the hospitality industry and really the safety and well-being of the customers should be their first priority," she added.

Ultimately, the eight passengers did rejoin the cruise before 8:30 a.m. ET Tuesday in Dakar, Senegal, Norwegian told NBC News in an e-mail Tuesday evening, after this story originally published.

Norwegian said the passengers were responsible for making their own travel arrangements to rejoin the ship.

"Despite the series of unfortunate events outside of our control, we will be reimbursing these eight guests for their travel costs from Banjur, Gambia to Dakar, Senegal," a cruise line spokesperson said in a statement. "We remain in communication with the guests and are providing additional information as it becomes available."

A silver lining of the catastrophe was that the Campbells were able to connect with another Norwegian Dawn passenger — Julia Lenkoff, 80 — who was also left on the island, but for a medical reason.

Lenkoff was on a different day tour Wednesday. She had "medically disembarked" from the cruise to seek local treatment on that day, Norwegian said.

Norwegian said that its care team tried to call Lenkoff several times and was unable to reach her and that it worked with its port agent in São Tomé and Príncipe for updates on her health.

The Campbells met Lenkoff and were able to put her in contact with her family in California, who flew her home — a move Lenkoff's daughter said "saved her life."

"She's a world traveler. She travels all the time. So this was going to be one of her bucket list trips, because she's been to 120 countries so far, and she wanted to get to 130," her daughter, Lana Lenkoff Geis, said in an interview that aired Tuesday on "TODAY."

Norwegian said Lenkoff was escorted on a flight to Lisbon, Portugal, then put in the care of airport staff members to continue her journey back to the U.S., where she has safely returned.

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Cruise passengers left stranded on african island to be reimbursed for some travel cost paid to return to ship.

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The eight cruise passengers who were stranded on an African island after their ship left the port without them will be reimbursed for some of the costs they endured while trying to make it back onto the ship, the cruise line said.

Jill and Jay Campbell, of South Carolina, along with four other Americans and two Australians, had to race through seven different countries in 48 hours to reboard the Norwegian Dawn in Senegal on Tuesday.

They had earlier hoped to board the ship at the port in Gambia in West Africa, traveling 15 hours through six countries to reach the port on Sunday, only to find that the ship could not dock due to low tides, according to WPDE.

From there, the group boarded a bus and had to take a ferry across a river, Kurt Gies, the son-in-law of another passenger who was left on the island of São Tomé and Principe after she suffered a stroke , told The Post.

A spokesperson for Norwegian Cruise Line says the passengers will be reimbursed for the costs they endured while trying to race from Gambia to Senegal.

“Despite the series of unfortunate events outside of our control, we will be reimbursing these eight guests for their travel costs from Banjur, Gambia to Dakar, Senegal,” the cruise line said.

It had earlier said the passengers — who were left on the island without any of their belongings from the cabin, including money, medicine and necessary travel documents — were “responsible for any necessary travel arrangements to rejoin the ship.”

Keep up with The Post's coverage of the Norwegian Cruise debacle

• Eight Norwegian Cruise passengers, including a pregnant woman and an elderly man with a heart condition, were stranded on an African island without money and vital medications after the vessel left port without them.
• A spokesperson for the cruise line claimed the passengers were left on the island “on their own or with a private tour” and missed the “all-aboard time” by over an hour, according to the company.
• Americans Jill Campbell and her husband, Jay Campbell, said they are unsure whether they even want to resume the 20-day voyage after Norwegian Cruise Lines forgot about its “basic duty of care.”
• The eight passengers raced through seven different countries over a span of 48 hours to make it to Senegal, where the ship docked Tuesday morning,
• Doug and Violeta Sanders, a stranded Australian couple, have spoken out about their ordeal , saying it was “the worst experience of our lives.”
• Julie Lenkoff, 80,  suffered a stroke during an excursion on the cruise — and was left “alone” and “helpless” to find her way back to the US, according to her family.
• COLUMN: Cruise ship was right to ditch the late passengers in Africa

Check out The Post’s tips on what to do if you’re left stranded like the Norwegian Cruise passengers

As they scrambled to find a way back to the ship, working with the US Embassy in Angola, the Campbells had to shell out more than $5,000 in food, toiletries and hotels — as they were the only ones in the group that had a Visa credit card on their persons, they told WRAL.

The group finally reboarded the Norwegian Dawn Tuesday morning, but they hadn’t spoken directly with cruise officials, Gies said.

The Dawn is now expected to continue its 21-day African voyage through next Wednesday, when it will dock for the final time in Barcelona, Spain.

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Matador Original Series

Eight Passengers Stranded After Breaking the Number One Rule of Cruise Travel

E xperienced cruisers probably know lots of tips and tricks for traveling on cruise ships: make your dining reservations early, do laundry on board instead of overpacking , and don’t fill your days at sea with back-to-back activities.

But even first-time cruisers know one major rule that applies to all cruise lines, all cruises, and all ships, no matter where in the world you are: don’t miss the boat.

Unfortunately for eight travelers on an African cruise stopped in São Tomé and Príncipe, an island just to the east of Equatorial Guinea, they found out the hard way what happens when you break that rule. When they were late returning to their ship after a day on land, it did what it warned would happen — they were left behind by the cruise.

Eight passengers on the Norwegian Dawn were left stranded in Säo Tome, roughly 300 miles off the coast of mainland Africa, when they failed to return to port in time for the ship’s departure. Photo: mbrand85 /Shutterstock

The group of travelers had booked a daytime excursions through an independent company, rather than booking one directly through their ship, the Norwegian Dawn. While independent tours can be a great way to save money and have a more unique adventure, they come with one major downside, which is that ships won’t wait for passengers who are late. If you book an excursion through your cruise company, the ship is guaranteed to wait for you — but no such offer is made if you book an independent tour.

In various interviews with media outlets, the group recounted that they claimed they told their guide they were running late, causing the guide to call the ship to inform it that passengers would miss the “return to ship” time. By the time the guests finally returned to the port, the ship had finished boarding, though it was still anchored in the harbor. Harbor employees called the ship, and when they got no response, decided to ferry the passengers to the Norwegian Dawn. But the captain did not let them on board, the Daily Mail reports. Per various media sources, the ship did give the passengers their passports, which they had not taken with them.

Two Americans in the group told reporters that they thought the ship should have made an exception, seemingly implying that the following day at sea without a stop meant that it could leave late without consequence. “The captain could have made an easy decision to turn one of the tender boats back, pick us up, safely load us and then go on the way,” passenger Jay Campbell said. “They had no port to call for the next day, they were simply going to be at sea.”

Photo: Norwegian Cruise Lines

Per Norwegian Cruises’ online documents , it’s the guest’s responsibility to be back to the ship on time. “In all ports of call, it is also the guest’s responsibility to be back onboard the ship no later than one (1) hour prior to the ship’s scheduled departure time. Please be aware that shipboard time may differ from the port of call and it is the guest’s responsibility to follow the shipboard time. In the event a guest misses the ship, it will be the guest’s responsibility to pay all expenses incurred to rejoin the ship,” reads the company’s “Frequent Asked Questions” page.

The travelers are now having to do just that, with the American couple claiming they’ve spent more than $6,000 to cover the group’s time on the island and travel to rejoin the ship in Gambia or Senegal, depending on logistics. Per People Magazine , four of the travelers are older individuals, and one has an unspecified heart condition.

Matador Network recently asked a cruise line exec what happens if passengers miss their ships , and the answer is pretty straightforward across all lines and sailings: they have to pay their way to the next port.

Why ships can’t wait on late passengers

The Norwegian Dawn carries more than 2,000 guests and 1,000 passengers, all of whom need to be accounted for before the ship can leave a port. Photo: Dennis MacDonald /Shutterstock

I sailed on the Norwegian Dawn in February 2024, and while it had its ups and downs , the ship does make it very, very clear that it will leave without you if you’re late. It holds about 2,000 people, each of whom has to be accounted before prior to the ship’s departure — which is why the “ return to ship ” time at various ports is often an hour or two earlier than the actual departure time . That gives the crew and captain time to ready for departure. Large cruises like the Norwegian Dawn have to stick to a strict schedule, and can’t easily make changes.

I know this not because I’m a frequent cruiser — in fact, the Dawn was my first big cruise — but because Norwegian Cruise Lines informs you of this non-stop. The evening before you arrive, there’s a ship-wide announcement with arrival and departure times for the next day. The information is repeated — repeatedly — the morning you arrive in a port. The return to ship time is printed on the daily newsletter handed out in each room, on the free Norwegian phone app, and on all the various message boards around the ship. There’s usually a buffer time built into this window to accommodate guests who are only a few minutes late.

All cruise companies have fixed times by which passengers must return to the ship at each port. Photo: byvalet /Shutterstock

It’s also a fact listed on Norwegian’s excursion’s page. It’s one of the main reasons many cruisers exclusively book official cruise excursions, because they’re the only way to guarantee the ship will wait for you if you’re late. (Third-party and independent activity operators are also unlikely to refund you if the ship makes a last-minute change and skips a port of call).

While I support booking excursions with local operators, it comes with the known risk that you’ll be left behind by the cruise ship if you’re late. That’s exactly what happened in this case, exactly as Norwegian’s website said would happen. While it’s unfortunate and understandably stressful for the travelers, it’s hardly the cruise line’s fault, and I know I’d be a little annoyed if I had made it back in time, only to have the whole ship delayed for a small group people who made a poor decision.

By the way: guests getting left behind at a port is very, very rare — hence why this one occasion is making global headlines.

How to avoid getting left behind by cruise ships

Independent excursions offer plenty of benefits — but come with the downside that the ship won’t wait if you’re late. Photo: Suzie Dundas

The easiest way for travelers to make sure they don’t get left behind at a port is to book an official excursion through the cruise line. However, official excursions are often more expensive, and a much smaller amount of the cost goes directly to local communities. Without knowing what company or excursions the stranded passengers booked, it’s impossible to know if they followed the rules below. But the following guidelines can help ensure you don’t end up waiving your ship goodbye from land.

• Book with a company that does offer a return to ship guarantee : Third-party companies can’t make the ship wait for you, but they can handle all the logistics if you do miss it. ShoreExcursioner.com will pay up to $500 in travel fees if an excursion booked through them causes you to miss your ship, and ToursByLocals will pay for your accommodations and transportation to the next port if you miss your ship. According to their website, it’s only happened twice — ever.
• Read the online reviews : Plenty of independent operators are reputable and responsible, which means they’re very unlikely to play fast and loose with your return time. The best way to determine if an operator seems reputable is to look at online reviews. Feedback from actual past guests can help you gauge how established and professional the company or tour guide is.
• Talk to your operator in advance: Reputable operators will be familiar with hosting cruise guests and understand the ins and outs of cruise ship scheduling. If you’re worried about, message your operator in advance. Ask them if they’ve ever has issues with being back on time, whether they’ve served guests on your cruise before, and how much of a buffer they build in for traffic and other potential delays.

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Cruise ship carrying 1,500 passengers stuck in Spain port due to Bolivian passengers’ visa problems

A view of the cruise ship MSC Armony moored in the port of Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, April 3, 2024. Authorities said Wednesday that a group of 69 Bolivians are not being allowed to disembark from a cruise ship in the Spanish northeastern port of Barcelona because they lack valid documents to enter the European Union’s Schengen area. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

A passenger is photographed on the cruise ship MSC Armony, moored in the port of Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, April 3, 2024. Authorities said Wednesday that a group of 69 Bolivians are not being allowed to disembark from a cruise ship in the Spanish northeastern port of Barcelona because they lack valid documents to enter the European Union’s Schengen area. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Passengers are photographed on the cruise ship MSC Armony, moored in the port of Barcelona, Spain, Wednesday, April 3, 2024. Authorities said Wednesday that a group of 69 Bolivians are not being allowed to disembark from a cruise ship in the Spanish northeastern port of Barcelona because they lack valid documents to enter the European Union’s Schengen area. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

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BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — A cruise ship reportedly carrying 1,500 passengers was stuck Wednesday in the Spanish northeastern port of Barcelona due to the visa problems of a group of Bolivian passengers who were due to disembark there, officials said.

Authorities say 69 Bolivians were not being allowed to leave the ship because they lacked valid documents to enter the European border-free Schengen area. Solange Duarte, a Bolivian diplomat in Barcelona, told The Associated Press she received reports some of the stranded Bolivians had been duped into obtaining fake visas but had no further information.

“We have asked the families to indicate who has processed this visa and we have not gotten answers,” she said, adding she heard it was possible the Bolivians would be transferred to a different ship.

Spain’s national police was looking into the possibility of a fake visa scam, Duarte said.

Spanish state news agency Efe and other media said some 1,500 passengers were on board the MSC Armony hoping to continue the cruise to Croatia.

Bolivia’s deputy foreign affairs minister, Fernando Pérez, said the country was waiting “to see what the Spanish authorities decide what to do.”

A statement from the Bolivian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday said the Bolivian Embassy in Spain and the country’s Consulate General in Barcelona “are carrying out the pertinent steps to address this case,” coordinating with Spanish authorities, as well as with the MSC Cruises Company.

MSC Cruises said in a statement the Bolivians included families and children.

It said the “passengers appeared to have proper documentation upon boarding in Brazil. We have been informed by the authorities that the visas are not valid for entry into the Schengen area. As a result, passengers have not been able to disembark in Barcelona, which was their final destination.”

The company said the ship remained in port while it works with authorities to facilitate the process.

The Schengen area is an ID-check-free travel zone comprising 29 European countries, most from the European Union.

This story was corrected to show that the Schengen zone is a European rather than European Union creation and comprises 29 countries.

8 Norwegian Cruise Passengers Stranded on African Island Catch Up to Ship After Traversing 7 Countries

T he group of stranded American and Australian passengers included four elderly people, one with a heart condition and a pregnant woman

• Nine Norwegian Cruise Line passengers were reportedly left behind on the African island of São Tomé and Príncipe on March 27 
• The group was on a guided excursion that got delayed, leading them to miss the ship’s "all aboard" call 
• A statement from Norwegian Cruise Lines noted that all guests are responsible for returning to the docked ship at the designated call time 
• Eight people were able to catch up to the ship on Tuesday morning after reportedly traversing seven countries.
• One, who had fallen ill before the incident, has safely returned to the U.S.

Multiple passengers were stranded on an island in Africa after their Norwegian Cruise Line ship reportedly left them behind. After several days of uncertainty and a trek across seven countries, they're now back on board the vessel.

On Wednesday, March 27, South Carolina couple Jill and Jay Campbell were enjoying a guided tour on the island of São Tomé and Príncipe located off the continent's western coast, ABC15 News reported at the time. The pair was with six other American and Australian passengers when they realized they wouldn’t make it back to the ship on time due to their tour taking longer than planned.

Though the tour operator contacted the cruise ship’s captain to inform them of the delay, the captain refused to let them back on the still-anchored ship when they arrived at the port because it was after the "all aboard" call, per the outlet. 

The São Tomé and Príncipe Coast Guard allegedly then took them by boat directly to the ship where the captain again did not permit them to board. 

Related: Carnival Cruise Passenger Captures Ship Fire on Video After Reports of Lightning Strike

The group later encountered another stranded passenger, an 80-year-old woman, who was hospitalized on the island after a cruise line tour, the outlet stated. The woman reportedly experienced memory and vision loss due to a medical emergency. 

In addition to the ill passenger, the group also includes one person who is pregnant, one with a heart condition and four elderly travelers. 

The majority of the group left their medications and credit cards on the ship except for the Campbells, who have reportedly paid over $5,000 for food, accommodations, and other necessities for their fellow passengers. 

On Sunday, the U.S. Embassy in Angola allegedly arranged for the group to fly to the West African country of Gambia, the ship's next planned port of call, so they could reboard. 

Related: 2 Holland America Line Crew Members Killed During Onboard 'Incident' in the Bahamas

Unfortunately, the group discovered the cruise ship wasn’t docked at the port in Gambia as planned because it had to spend another day at sea due to low tides. ABC News 4 reports the passengers spent fifteen hours traveling through six countries to make it to the port on Sunday. 

“We have to cross the ferry to get into Senegal,” Campbell told the outlet on Monday, marking their seventh country. “We just learned from the gentleman that the ferry hadn’t been working, but he said no problem, if the ferry is not working we will get another little boat and then pick up a car on the other side. And then once we get on the other side of Senegal, it’s another four-hour drive.” 

Related: Royal Caribbean Confirms Death of Passenger on 9-Month World Cruise

In a statement to PEOPLE, Norwegian Cruise Line said, “On the afternoon of March 27, 2024, while the ship was in São Tomé and Príncipe, an African island nation, eight guests who were on the island on a private tour not organized through us missed the last tender back to the vessel, therefore not meeting the all aboard time of 3 p.m. local time."

The statement continued, “While this is a very unfortunate situation, guests are responsible for ensuring they return to the ship at the published time, which is communicated broadly over the ship’s intercom, in the daily print communication and posted just before exiting the vessel.”

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The cruise line added that guests are “responsible for any necessary travel arrangements” to meet the ship at the next port and that they had each of their passports “delivered to the local port agents to retrieve” when they missed their all aboard call.

The group was finally able to catch up to the vessel. They reached Dakar, Senegal, its next port, on Monday night, PEOPLE confirmed.

After what they'd been through, Jill told NBC News in a story published on Tuesday, "We are considering whether or not we are going to board the ship. We believe there was a basic duty of care that they had forgotten about, so it does concern us." While she allowed that Norwegian technically followed protocol, she says, "I believe that they really forgot that they are people working in the hospitality industry and really the safety and well-being of the customers should be their first priority."

On Tuesday morning, the eight passengers, less the person who had fallen ill and later safely returned home to the United States, chose to board the cruise. Norwegian confirmed the news to PEOPLE in a statement.

"Despite the series of unfortunate events outside of our control, we will be reimbursing these eight guests for their travel costs from Banjur, Gambia to Dakar, Senegal. We remain in communication with the guests and are providing additional information as it becomes available,"

The Norwegian Dawn departed from Cape Town, South Africa, on March 20 for a 21-day trip that will end in Barcelona on April 10.

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20-year-old man missing after jumping off a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, report says

• A 20-year-old man on holiday with his family went overboard from a Royal Caribbean cruise. 
• The man, who's been missing since early Thursday morning, may have jumped, a report said. 
• The US Coast Guard has launched a search operation. 

A 20-year-old man who was vacationing with his family on a cruise may have jumped overboard, The New York Post reported.

Royal Caribbean confirmed that a passenger, whose identity has not been revealed, went overboard near The Bahamas at about 4 a.m. on Thursday and has been missing since then.

The US Coast Guard launched a search for the passenger on Thursday.

A Royal Caribbean spokesperson told Business Insider that the cruise line's "Care Team is providing support and assistance to the guest's family during this difficult time."

Bryan Sims, a fellow cruise passenger, told The New York Post that he'd hung out with the passenger in the hot tub until 3:30 a.m. Sims said the man appeared to be "pretty drunk."

Sims told the Post that after leaving the hot tub, they encountered the passenger's father while approaching the elevators.

"His dad was fussing at him for being drunk," Sims said.

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Deborah Morrison, another passenger on board the cruise, told the Post that "there was a lot of yelling and that the crew was alerted immediately."

"The ship's crew immediately launched a search and rescue effort alongside the US Coast Guard, who has taken over the search," the Royal Caribbean spokesperson said.

#Breaking @USCG crews are searching for a 20-year-old man who went overboard from the Liberty of the Seas cruise ship 57 miles from Great Inagua this morning. USCG Cutter Seneca and Air Station Miami HC-144 crews are conducting the search. #USCG #SAR pic.twitter.com/zZPpKOdyCn — USCGSoutheast (@USCGSoutheast) April 4, 2024

The Liberty of the Seas departed from South Florida and was 57 miles from Great Inagua in The Bahamas when the passenger went overboard.

The cruise ship has 18 decks and can accommodate up to 3,634 passengers. It's served by a crew of about 1,300.

The chances of falling overboard on a cruise ship are extremely low .

In 2023, about 31 million passengers traveled on a cruise, and at least 10 people went overboard, with two of them surviving, Business Insider reported .

"Even one incident is one too many," a spokesperson for Cruise Lines International Association told Business Insider, adding that "the vast majority of cases are either reckless behavior or some form of intentional act. People don't just inadvertently fall over the side of a ship."

Last month, a 23-year-old man who felt seasick fell overboard from the MSC Euribia cruise ship while crossing the North Sea in Europe and was presumed dead.

In December, an MSC Cruises passenger jumped from one of its ships while sailing from Europe to South America.

According to a CLIA report, only 28.2% of passengers who fell overboard between 2009 and 2019 were successfully rescued.

Watch: Sub taking tourists to see the Titanic goes missing

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