Working on cruise ships is less than glamorous

Many keep returning for the same reason I returned to my summer job as a student

By John Toth

The Bulletin

When I was working in a summer camp in my high school and college years, leaving at the end of the summer was not a happy occasion.

It meant leaving behind a very comfortable and simple existence and all the friends I made throughout the summer.

I had no choice. I had to go back home and start the fall semester. Departing my world for the previous two months was not easy. I wanted it to continue. The drive back home was long and sad.

When I started cruising with Sharon, the Bulletin’s cruising editor, I started noticing the same sort of environment among the ship‘s staff with whom I came in contact. For me, the job lasted two months. For them, it lasts for up to nine months, and while it’s hard work, it’s basically also a social setting that tends to draw people more inward than back to the real world.

I’ve talked to many crew members about what is it that draws them back, often for several decades? One of our dining- room servers had worked on ships for 26 years.

Most of the staff are contracted from foreign countries, where they have families. They send much of their earnings back to them. It could be argued that getting paid for working on a ship is much more profitable than any job they could find in their country. For a lot of them, that’s true.

But entertainers are on a different level. They get paid more than the average crew member, but their pay still isn’t really all that great. The entertainment business is very competitive, and there is only room for a few on top. Performing on ships gives them a steady paycheck, plus free lodging.

There is something else. I noticed that the same work environment exists on ships that I experienced working in a summer camp during my student days. My job was repetitive, and so is theirs.

Mine was comfortable, because I didn’t have to worry about the routine things in the real world, like making meals, shopping, looking for ways to make friends and so on. It’s the same way on the ships.

I really liked the camp’s ready-made social environment. On the ship, the social setting is even more prevalent.

On my last cruise, I had the fortune of catching the last concert of a rock band contracted to perform on the Regal Princess. The very last concert they gave was a Led Zeppelin cover album performance, with all my favorite songs from that group.

They did a decent job playing all the numbers, and the female lead singer had no problems reaching all of Robert Plant’s high notes.

After the show, I hung around to talk to them, and while they were friendly, I felt like they were not in the best of moods. They had been performing on the Regal Princess for five months and  were getting off the ship the next morning.

Their friends were in the theater to see them close the show. Maybe it was a big relief to them that the contract was over, but for five months they didn’t have to look for gigs, argue with venue owners about money, transportation, lodging, and what to do in their spare time. The ship was a safe haven for them, just like my summer job was a safe haven for me.

But they also could not seek out other opportunities or grow professionally, because they performed the same songs repeatedly for five months. Now that it was all over, their friends were saying goodbye to them.

I have watched several videos made by performers who were disembarking at the end of their contracts. It was like the scenes I experienced each time it was time to go back to the city and return to classes.

I follow an ice skater on YouTube who has spent most of her last eight years performing on cruise ships. She now says that she’s done and will seek out other opportunities, but I think she will sign another contract and go back.

It’s not a bad life. At camp, I often had no idea what day it was. The repetition didn’t bother me. I knew each day what I had to do, when I was off work, what I was going to do during my off hours, and where I was going to eat daily. There wasn’t a lot of thinking to do. For two months, I was taking a mental vacation.

My summer job was like a magnet. I was drawn to it for seven years until I graduated from college. Many of the staffers around me were the same way. They kept returning because they wanted to come back, not because the pay was all that great. We liked being there and chose to be there, at least until the real world caught up with us, and the party was over.

That’s exactly how I observed the crews on cruise ships behaving, except they have a much larger magnet than I had, and they don’t have to leave at the end of the summer to register for classes.