Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (4 page)

Given the sheer scale of food production — a mid-sized ship serves 1,500 to 1,800 three- or four-course meals every evening, and a large ship serves twice that number — various shortcuts would be expected. Cruise lines increasingly use pre-packaged foods, including canned soups, pre-cut and pre-sized portions, and frozen desserts. Much of your dinner is prepared in advance and kept either under heat lamps or in food warmers. In almost every case, all that is added before delivery from the galley to your table are last-minute finishing touches.

Cruise-line food is certainly palatable, but the discerning diner will experience many disappointments. Egg product is commonly used instead of fresh eggs; poached eggs may be made in mass, then refrigerated, and later reheated by dipping in hot water immediately before serving; salad greens are often wilted or showing signs of rust from sitting too long in the refrigerator; and a concentrate consisting of 77 percent water and 23 percent “coffee-based dry matter” is often used for coffee. Do not assume that real ground coffee will be served.

Trusting menu descriptions may produce similar disappointments. On a premium cruise line, a “classic Caesar” salad came with iceberg lettuce; on an ultraluxury cruise line, the same menu item was served with rosemary-flavored croutons. A “spinach salad” on a premium cruise line was served with a single spinach leaf atop a bed of iceberg lettuce; a “watercress salad” on an ultraluxury cruise line had no watercress. The list could go on: sorrel soup with no sorrel, cannoli with rancid mascarpone cheese, lobster bisque with no lobster, Caribbean black bean soup that resembled a minestrone with a couple of black beans thrown in. The first couple of times you might overlook these deficiencies, but with repetition you learn to not trust the menu. You place your order and you take your chances.

Food service is also below standards common to mid-scale or upscale restaurants onshore. If you believe that good service is fast service, then a cruise is a perfect choice. On most ships meals are forced into slots of 90 minutes (give or take 15 minutes) from the time you are seated to the time you are escorted out the door. Courses are served in sequence, but they are not coordinated so that everyone at the table is served the same course at the same time.

The norm, even on cruise lines where there is no need to rush a person out of the dining room, is to serve the next course as soon as the previous course is finished. I recently sailed on an ultraluxury cruise ship where there was open seating (meaning no one was waiting for the table to be vacated). Frequently my plate was removed as soon as I put my fork down — even while I was still chewing — with a new plate appearing before I had swallowed. If I took my time before beginning the next course, I was asked whether everything was all right.

You’ll see things on cruise ships that would never be seen, much less tolerated, at a restaurant on land. On both Norwegian Cruise Line and Holland America Line, I watched an assistant maitre d’ assist passengers by removing their lobster tail from the shell. In both cases, this employee went from table to

THE
RADISSON DIAMOND'S
GRAND DINING ROOM

On the ultraluxury
Radisson Diamond,
the same waiters that served my partner and me were also serving a table of senior officers and VIPs. Their mineral water was poured from a bottle wrapped in a white napkin; our mineral water — the same brand — was poured without the napkin.

We watched as they were served their entree: a whole sea bass weighing about eight pounds. The fish was brought out on a tray and carved at their table: a very nice touch

— except that our table had a fish head (with its open mouth and eyes) staring us in the face (no more than four feet away) from the time the fish was presented until their table had finished their entree. Our table had the unpleasant experience of the extremely fishy smell, and we had to watch as the assistant maitre d' cleaned the fish bones in front of us, at the end pulling the full ribcage into the air from the tail and holding what was left vertically before taking it away to the garbage.

Ultraluxury? I don't think so!

table, passenger to passenger, using the same knife and fork on almost 100 plates. He’d wave the silverware around, accidentally rub it against his and others’ clothing, and frequently touch seat backs with the knife and fork as he talked to passengers.

Granted, these types of occurrences are not commonplace, but they happen often enough. But if a similar situation happened just once at an onshore restaurant, most people would choose not to return. If you complained to management at that onshore restaurant, the matter would be addressed and an effort made to retain your patronage. When these situations happen at sea, however, the passenger is often viewed as the problem for having complained. The behavior continues.

Why do people keep going on cruises if these types of occurrences are so common? In most cases, the problems are not even acknowledged or else they are ignored. This is illustrated by a comment a fellow passenger on the ultraluxury
Seabourn Goddess I
made in response to dismal service at lunch. Although he and his wife were visibly upset and dissatisfied, when I attempted to commiserate, he excused the major lapses in service by simply saying, “They are doing the best that they can.” He fully intended to take a future cruise with the same cruise line.

I Booked This Cabin and This Is the Cabin I Want

Cruise ship accommodations are quite different from the pictures in advertisements and brochures. The contrast was made abundantly clear to me on Royal Caribbean Cruise Line in 1993. I was walking by the purser’s desk and overheard a fellow passenger pointing to the picture in a brochure and saying quite loudly, “I booked this cabin and this is the cabin I want.” The picture in the brochure, taken with a wide-angle lens, made the man’s 140-square-foot room look roomy and spacious — at least two or three times larger than it actually was. I was envious. His room was almost 20 percent larger than mine.

Actual room size is confronted by almost everyone taking his or her first cruise. Brochures display images and descriptions that give the impression of a decent-sized hotel room. Very few brochures indicate the actual square footage of the room.

You quickly learn that rooms may be as small as 120 square feet, in standard categories are often between 140 and 160 square feet, and are rarely — unless a mini-suite or a suite — larger than 190 to 200 square feet, including the bathroom and the closets.

To put this into perspective, a typical queen-size bed is about 40 square feet — it occupies 20 to 33 percent of the room. When you add a dresser, a desk and chair, and perhaps a couch and bookshelf, there is little room to maneuver. Passengers on Royal Caribbean International, known to have some of the smallest standard rooms, often comment that the bathroom is so small that it can accommodate only one person at a time. Full-sized individuals complain that using the toilet or the shower is a challenge.

At the other extreme are the suites found on many ships. Although still smaller than a suite in a hotel — often equivalent in size to a standard hotel room — they can be comfortable. Many suites are 500 square feet; a penthouse suite may be two or three times that size. Some can be ostentatious, such as the villas on Norwegian Cruise Lines’ new ship, the
Norwegian Star.
Standard cabins on this ship range in size from 160 to 172 square feet; the villa provides an astounding 5,300 square feet.

I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS IN STEERAGE CLASS

Cruise lines advertise that classes on cruise ships are something of the past. Oceangoing vessels used to have two or three classes (first class, steerage, and so on) and based on their class of service, passengers were restricted in where they were permitted to go on the ship. Although today’s ships are represented as being class-

BIGGEST SUITES

The
Norwegian Star
offers the most incredible suites you will ever find on a cruise ship. At 5,300 square feet each, the Garden Villas are the cruise industry's largest accommodations.

Each three-bedroom villa has a contemporary living/dining room with a grand piano, flat-screen TV/VCR, and a desk equipped with a laptop computer, printer/fax, and a modem. Each bedroom, decorated in rich colors with Asian paintings and Japanese prints, has its own dressing room and walk-in closets as well as an en suite bathroom with floor-to-ceiling windows, a whirlpool tub, separate shower, double sinks, and a television. One bedroom opens onto a Japanese garden with decorative pools, a small bridge, sunny and shaded seating areas, and a Jacuzzi. A staircase leads up to a large expanse of open deck overlooking the ship's pool area.

The suite even comes with a stainless steel butler's pantry, which is used for in-suite food and beverage service. It is particularly useful when the occupants wish to host dinner parties or cocktail parties in their room.

free, many class distinctions nevertheless remain.

You Get What You Pay For

I first became aware of onboard class differences when, on a Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ship, I noticed that passengers in rooms on the deck above mine were given different colored (and plusher) towels than those given to me. The point was driven home several years later on Royal Cruise Line when I was unexpectedly upgraded to the Owner’s Suite. I learned that it isn’t just towels that vary based on one’s room. Bathroom amenities — shampoo, body lotion, soaps, slippers, and so on

— vary in both number and quality between different classes of cabin. As well, preference in accessing activities (including alternative restaurants) and in assignment of dining room tables is often given to those in more expensive rooms. These passengers are given first choice of tables in the alternative restaurant and the most favorable tables in the main dining room.

Holland America Line, for example, not only has a private dining room and private lounge for its passengers residing in suites, it also gives suite passengers priority seating in its alternative restaurant, and its two-level dining room is stratified based on class of

cabins: those in more expensive cabins sit on the upper level, those in cheaper cabins are seated on the lower level. Passengers with more expensive rooms are also more likely to be invited to VIP parties and receptions or to the captain’s (or other officer’s) table for dinner, and they will be provided with more personalized service. None of this is surprising, but it is inconsistent with the egalitarian image that cruise lines project.

You Don’t Get What You Pay For

Like hotels and restaurants and other aspects of the hospitality industry in general, cruise lines themselves are stratified into classes. Curiously, these class differences are not always consistent with differences in pricing. In fact, very often you’ll pay the same price for equivalent accommodations on a mass-market cruise line as you would on a premium cruise line. But the product advertised is quite different, and the product received may also vary. One key difference between ships in these categories is the cruise line’s budgets for food and for activities, and the ratio of staff to passengers. Premium cruise lines tend to have more workers per passenger than cruise lines in the lower categories. The largest ships afloat are in the mass-market category.

The greatest difference is between cruise lines in the ultraluxury category and the others. Ultraluxury ships are smaller and have more staff per passenger — sometimes the ratio approaches one to one. As well, you’ll enjoy meals that are prepared to order rather than mass-produced.