Sassafrass

Looks as if one Crystal ship is being “arrested” for unpaid oil bills. Passengers were disembarked in Bimini to be ferried back to Miami.

On their FB pages, Silversea is advertising for staff, everything from bartenders to hostesses/hosts, butlers, plumbers, pip-fitters, etc., etc. just to name a few.

The infra-structure required to keep the cruise industry functioning is mind boggling. Is there any other industry that involves the number and variety of workers, complexity of knowledge and range of businesses that is employed in cruising? After so much time, it must be difficult to pull all the pieces together again. Just pulling together food and beverage orders and shipments, and the worry they will be wasted if cruises are cancelled, must, at this point be a devastating worry. Hiring and training staff, then seeing them succumb to illness, yet needing them for cruises to proceed, and maintaining unused ships, all crushing.

Not cruising is sad on a personal level, but I hope most of the lines can withstand this and survive, not just for passengers, but for all the companies and individuals world wide that depend on cruise lines for their livelihood.
Hoping desperately this recent surge of Omicron is the last.

I also hope Fodorites booked on cruises get to go and enjoy them. Keep posting your experiences. Those of us who can’t do it yet can cruise vicariously through you.

thursdaysd

Personally, I would be absolutely delighted if the companies building bigger and bigger polluting monstrosities masquerading as ships all went bankrupt and the vessels were broken up for scrap. I make an exception for the smaller and mid-range ships.

marydockham

I have cruised on the Symphony twice. One of my favorite ships. Everything was just wonderful. I enjoyed more than Seabourn and Silversea. Very very sad to see a grand ship go down like this.

mlgb

IMO staffing is why lines keep sailing now at such low occupancy (25% from LA ports right now). If they send staff home it will be difficult to replace them, they have fingers crossed for Spring and Summer season. You can see on Cruise Critic that a lot of people have moved their cruise dates forward to late February and beyond. I know NCL is transferring positive staff to Covid ships for quarantine, as is RCI.

I just booked another Mexican Riviera cruise to take advantage of low occupancy and single supplement (Majestic Princess). As long as I can keep it under $100/day all in for a balcony, I will sail . I felt safe on NCL with low occupancy and proof of vax and port testing. It was pretty easy to distance from "maskholes". I don't have to fly to the port so there is also that.

Princess requires us to procure our own rapid tests which IMO is less safe than port supervised testing. If case CVS cancels my rapid antigen at the last minute, I have ordered proctored Binax tests as a backup.

Sassafrass

mlgb, I am so happy you and others are getting to sail. I can’t right now because of health issues, but I love reading about other people’s trips and cruises.

thursdaysd, that is a fair opinion and many will agree with you. I have read a good bit about the issues. Your concerns are certainly valid. The proliferation of mega-ships in the last decade is mind-blowing. I thought some of the ships I have been on were big, but now they are considered mid-sized and personally are as big as I want to go on. Even small ships seem big to me and I enjoy them a lot. They seem to be less about entertainment and more about the ocean. They probably pollute as much as the newer, more efficient ships though.

thursdaysd

Thanks, Sassafrass. I did enjoy my Bergen to Kirkenes cruise with Hurtigruten, and my trip up the Chilean coast on Navimag (in much less comfort, lol), but both those ships would have been making the voyage anyway, cruising wasn't the main purpose. I have been hanging out on Cruisecritic some, and it seems that a lot of those posters are mostly if not entirely interested in the food, the entertainment and the casino. Not a justification for the mega-ships.

mlgb

Depends on the itinerary whether a cruise is port intensive or not.

I am glad that my earlier cruises such as Alaska and Cape Horn were on smaller ships. For me the big downside of these new mega ships is how they overwhelm the ports. I don't care about casinos, laser tag or even most of the entertainment, although getting the Broadway shows on Bliss are a nice perk. I mostly walk laps, read and watch movies. Just like someone would do on a beach vacation. I do get off in ports, though. Even if it is just to walk around, maybe buy some local lunch or do an excursion if I have ship's credit. The west coast of Mexico really isn't that different than Southern California, except warmer and cheaper.

Right now cruisers are mostly escapees from cold weather and/or COVID in a "floating resort". So the same questions you would get about resorts, i.e., where to eat, what to do on, which cabin should I pick, etc.. There are a lot of people out there with credits from cancelled cruises that need to be used this year or at least booked by the end of the year. The ports are well known to most of these experienced cruisers (and probably have been visitied multiple times by many of them). So you will hear "I'm not going to bother to get off the ship, I've been to that port enough times."

I think they are sailing these big ships from the west coast, in order to hold on to crew in advance of the Alaska season. In the meantime they will run them through the Panama Canal and back, and up and down the West Coast.