This ship started as two Tribal class destroyers, HMS Nubian and HMS Zulu. In 1916, the first lost its bow to a torpedo (and then running aground); the second lost its stern to a mine. The admiralty decided to salvage the remains by joining them together into a new ship, dubbed HMS Zubian.
https://www.twz.com/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-f...
(they're from an older class that is not being built anymore, but the Perle should remain in service a few more years until enough of the new class units are delivered)
https://www.naval-group.com/fr/naval-group-livre-le-sous-mar...
https://archives.defense.gouv.fr/content/download/611644/102...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)
>In June 2006, it was announced that San Francisco's bow section would be replaced at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard with the bow of USS Honolulu, which was soon to be retired. San Francisco is four years older than Honolulu, but she had been refueled and upgraded in 2000–2002. The cost of her bow replacement has been estimated at $79 million, as compared with the estimated $170 million to refuel and overhaul the nuclear reactor of Honolulu.[11]
In the UK at least, passing one of these off as a standard repair is illegal (it's a 'radically altered vehicle' and would need to be registered as such with a special licence plate).
And you’re right - to identify coffin car a mobile x-ray device is needed. Edit: and yes, I was driving a car that wasn’t well repaired and absolutely safe for 5 years.
Where do you live for that to be legal?
I prefer Nuzu.
Take the dirtiest hotel you have ever been in, and then ensure you cant leave it for days at a time.
It interests me that demand is increasing but I suspect thats just good advertising.
* All the fun and "not thinking" of an all-inclusive resort (though obviously only if you pay for the drink packages) on land
* Generally cheaper than all inclusive resorts on mainland USA (I'm not as familiar with Europe)
* Competitive on pricing with all inclusive resorts in the Caribbean/Mexico
* Get to skip out on flight to the Caribbean/Mexico
* Get to skip out out of the overt semi-colonial feel of like... a Caribbean/Mexican all inclusive resort. If nothing else, while the crew (ie the people running the ship) are almost certainly going to be mostly south/south-east asian, the staff (ie the people actually supposed to interact with the passengers) are going to be sufficiently multi-culturally mixed to help make all those thoughts fade away...
And let's be real about most Caribbean/Mexican all-inclusive resorts... they aren't always the cleanest, and most people don't leave them except on tightly planned excursions anyways.
Peers had a habit of calling me for non-critical, non-production problems. The worst was Mardi Gras, where I'm on Bourbon Street for Fat Tuesday, and my operations head calls me with an analyst on the line and burns fifteen minutes with a problem that turned out to be development coding.
My phone did occasionally explode with voicemails and texts when I got back to port.
Some of my peers have been forced to take a corporate credit card to pay for internet access on their ship.
(If anyone from Apple is reading this, would be great to be able to schedule DND on a eSIM line.)
Here someone disables it entirely, but should be able to do something less intense than that too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/16hoo4h/automati...
Or is the issue that there is no way to set DND on a particular SIM on the front end?
Please take care of yourself, and consider the implications of peers who think it's OK to call you at these times. There are a lot of ways to say "no" without saying it.
Yours could include teaching your company to respect vacation time.
Of course it depends on the job, so this isn’t 100% guaranteed to be the case, but I find people who think they always have to be online are often just imagining that they have to because of anxiety, and if they just didn’t respond, nothing bad would happen to them.
I do think, over time, being more or less continuously in-touch became more normed.
But at the same time, it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default.
Not any tech job I’ve ever had, except very occasionally after hours if unavoidable due to working with people in Asia, and planned well in advance. Never during vacation, that would be crazy.
But there have probably been people on my same teams who thought it was expected, due to them being workaholics or just bad at sticking to boundaries.
Why do you care what that wage thief thinks?
Frankly, I'd be "pissy" if my superiors tried calling me when I'm on holiday and I would have no qualms informing them of that fact.
But then I'm not American.
Europeans being smug about how much better their society is than Americans’ is such an annoying cliche at this point. We get it, Europe is a paradise.
Btw, I’m American and I would simply not answer if my work tried to contact me while on vacation. Conversely, I know multiple Europeans with terribly unhealthy work/life balance who work constantly while on vacation.
Everyone I think about how bad American WLB is, I take a look at the supposed utopias of Europe and find that they’re whole nations of crabs in a bucket.
Including healthcare and public facilities? Or does this only apply to tech workers?
I get it, for Americans this is an unusual experience but the rest of the planet putting up with American Chiche’s about us is Tuesday
I guess that Renault employees are American, even if they are French.
I think this is described in Apple's documentary, not the one from Netflix.
That is time that I paid for that they took from me. I will never get it back.
There isn't really a shortage of other options with that feature (though it's shrinking); granted they mostly don't have people waiting on you.
Personally I'm a fan of "I'm on vacation, my phone is at home" though I understand that doesn't work for everyone. If there is an actual emergency, there are people who know how/where to reach me.
Okay, so this. Read it if you haven't. Probably the best essay on a generally "unheavy" topic I've ever read, and so iconic that "Cruise Essay" is dang near becoming its own genre, e.g. Gary Shteyngart's "A Meatball At Sea."
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
And these have zero appeal to me as well.
As someone who road trips all across the U.S. with the wife, the highlights have of course been the serendipitous ones.
Except with cruise ships, morally righteous people are declaring this specific thing wrong and trying to keep people from being allowed to do this.
The Guardian claims that "At full power the Harmony of the Seas’ two 16-cylinder engines would each burn 1,377 US gallons an hour" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/21/the-worl..., which would be 5.2 cubic meters per hour, or 125 cubic meters per day, so something between 100 and 125 tons. Other sources I've seen claim "up to 250 tons" (https://www.colorado.edu/mechanical/2016/07/25/how-much-fuel...). A ton of diesel-like fuel produces around 2.6 tons of CO2 (the O2 comes from the air).
So let's say 750 tons. Split across 5000 passengers, a 7-day cruise would be 750 / 5000 * 7 = roughly one ton of CO2 per passenger per cruise.
Myclimate estimates the total footprint of a 7-day cruise, standard double cabin on a >4000 passenger ship, one day in port, as 2.1 t (this presumably also covers food etc. so it's not surprising that it's higher). They also estimate just the flight (one passenger, round trip, economy class) of a trip from New York to Maui as 3 tons.
But the kind of environmentalists I am talking about aren't suggesting to regulate cruise ship emissions, they demand banning cruise ships, because they're a visible symbol of loosely-defined luxury/"excess", and thus any impact is seen as unjustifiable.
I knew there had to be some reason . . .
I say this is someone who had taken multiple motorcycle trips across the US. Coast to coast on one of them and another down Baja.
But I don't even have 16 friends so that will never be a problem. As the kids left the nest it has become just thew wife and I. We're a duprass.
Convoys work for this. Perhaps even more fun if they're fun cars with a lower car to passenger ratio.
The axiom of cruises is: You will never see these people again.
That being said I have made long term friends on cruises.
This is a strange comment, as most people still have to fly to a port city. So maybe that flight is shorter and a domestic flight, but it's still requires a flight.
When you finish your journey, you have to go through customs and show your passport. And your passport will usually be checked before you embark as well.
Also many western hemisphere countries including almost all of those in the Carribean have agreements in place which allow US citizens arriving and departing via a cruise ship to need only a birth certificate and government id.
Traveling with a passport is best practice, you for instance are in trouble if miss your ship for some reason, but is not required for the vast majority of cruises from the US.
In a cruise you can always just go back to the ship, and avoid any random issue.
Cruises fill the "cheap Caribbean getaway" segment for the sizable American population where getting a passport or not having a criminal history would otherwise be a blocker.
Arguably it's also a motivator in why Cruises have the reputation they do, but that's beside the point.
Porting in most Caribbean islands is a depressing experience as well - you get to see the predatory cruise influence on shops right at the port and are also bombarded with locals trying to exploit you (no offense to them, they're trying to make a living).
If you never leave the ship, it's as you describe it - the all-inclusive vacation without any work, but leaving the boat is by far the worst part and almost negates any perceived benefit imo.
Again, no offense to the locals and I'm sure if they had to choose between no tourism and tourism to help the economy, they'd choose tourism but it's a very strange and usually sad synergy between the cruise industry and the participating islands.
On the other hand, lots of people are returning customers so maybe there is something to be said for moving slowly across the ocean as your life ebbs away ;-)
Plus, there are sightseeing opportunities on land, and the neat thing about cruise ships is that they dock where the action is. Airports are always on the outskirts; ports tend to be situated pretty centrally in most cities.
Honestly, it's probably the nicest way to travel to faraway places, short of a private jet. It's not for everyone, but it's not a dystopian experience. The ships carry insane numbers of passengers, but they are also pretty darn spacious.
He is a college professor so utilizing this time to catch up on reading is very important to him. His wife gets to drink, gamble, and spend money which makes her happy.
But I did do an Atlantic crossing after semi-retiring. I paid for a minor cabin upgrade and it wasn't really worth it. I'm not sitting on a balcony crossing the Atlantic anyway and I'm not spending time in my cabin.
Transatlantic cruises tend to be mostly child free and most cruise lines cap capacity at about 2/3rds of a normal cruise, so there are plenty of quiet indoor places with a view of the ocean that you can use for reading.
I'll probably do again next time schedules align.
I had to google that......
I'm afraid 'raw dogging' means something very different in Blighty!
What does one call dogging in a manner that is raw?
The genz/alpha version is a noble form of asceticism, while the 'original' meaning is more a hedonistic indulgence without regard for consequences to yourself or others.
What are the consequences of, for example, staring at the live flight map and only the live flight map for a 7 hour flight [1]? Sounds boring as hell but you're not going to like bore yourself insane
[1] https://www.goal.com/en-us/lists/erling-haaland-raw-dogs-7-h...
You can do amazing traveling experiences for less, you are in control of your own life and what happens next and you will feel like spending much more time when discovering world, culture, history and people compared to same white box with same things at same places.
But its the same mentality of going to some properly amazing exotic place and then spending 2 weeks in luxury bubble of some 5 star resort. I don't complain - those folks leave interesting places and experiences for rest of us, but respecting that I cannot.
This kind of judgmental attitude is the thing that's not worthy of respect, imo.
Cruises are good for when I want to do nothing for a while.
I've never been on a cruise, but for me renting a beach house does the same. Sleep, eat, watch the ocean from the beach and do totally nothing.
Camping with friends also does it. Let all the kids play together, just sit and watch, doing nothing.
When I was a bit younger I would have considered "doing nothing" hell on earth, but with a busy life it's good to just do nothing once in a while.
Actually though, road trips scratch that itch for me as well. I don't plan them out except to say — let's wander off to the Great Lakes or lets follow the Mississippi River south — see all the river towns along the way. I've used AI to throw out ideas of things to see while on the road, or the wife and I fall back to looking for antique stores as an excuse to wander through the small downtowns of towns no one has heard of.
The US isn’t that much larger, I don’t think this argument holds. The geography and locations of population centres seem more of an issue.
Just search for one of the many pictures of the state (state!) of Texas superimposed over Europe.
The US is freaking huge compared to Europe.
I have compared them, and I don’t see what you’re seeing. Depending on how you measure (do you include European Russia, ie the bit west of the Urals?) Europe is larger.
https://www.worldatlas.com/geography/are-the-usa-and-europe-...
https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/unit...
I've been tempted to do at least part of one of the long distance US train routes but I think I'd get pretty bored, I'm guessing the food isn't very good, and I've spent a lot of time out West.
Driving is relaxing or interesting for me, almost no matter what. Even when it gets stressful I don't mind it. But I feel for those who don't have that same predilection, because everything would be blocked behind a chore.
Weird way to spend not-insignificant money on but to each their own
I’m happy to pay the cost to be in an environment that I can actually relax in.
For me, any time off spent away from home has a different timbre of rejuvenation and I say that as someone who loves being at home.
I actually enjoyed the cruise way more than I thought I would. The cruise allowed people to do what they want. My in-laws and others with less physical ability could go on bus tours or taxi around. People like me that preferred adventure can spend 8 hours walking through different nooks and crannies of the city. Being on deck in an open sea was nice and peaceful. I had been to Europe a few times before, but the cruise allowed me to go and walk around port cities that I wouldn't have been able to go to otherwise, without substantially more cost. Each with some interesting bits to walk through and good food to eat. It was a good, quick, demo for whether I wanted to plan a future trip to that city.
If I were planning a trip now for my immediate fanily, I wouldn't do a cruise. I do not spew vitriol and insults at those that do though. Most of them aren't as pathetic as you have been led to think.
> but the cruise allowed me to go and walk around port cities that I wouldn't have been able to go to otherwise, without substantially more cost
However, I still note that it was written by a person who identifies as someone generally uninterested in cruises i.e. not the typical cruise-ship enthusiast.
A previous commenter mentioned that cruises (paraphrase) “lack the colonial feel of mexican resorts” which is a testament to the power of consumerist illusion.
An all inclusive resort in the caribbean is also likely to be shitty to staff. Most people are drinking coffee or eating chocolate that has slavery somewhere along the supply line.
I think you can make the case that cruising is an unethical industry, either because of exploitative labor practices or environmental damage. But almost nobody who is criticizing cruising as a vacation is starting here. Instead, cruises are called trashy and fake in comparison to "authentic" travel experiences.
If you've ever been to a chinese restaurant or hired a landscaper you are dealing in the same or similar unpleasantness that you attribute to cruise staff. Assuming you are American FWIW.
https://www.dw.com/en/the-truth-about-working-on-a-cruise-sh...
If you're planning a holiday for ages spanning 2-75 for 3-5 families. What other holidays will have food that satisfies everyone's particular tastes, has activities for all ages and has a full suite of excursions or equally ringfenced "nothing" time. Its also comparatively safe.
All without putting the onus on someone to organise a huge trip with lots of competing interests and spending habits.
Sure, there are probably alternatives but I can understand the appeal even though I'm still pretty happy planning my own adventures when its me and my wife.
This is incredibly mean spirited. Besides perhaps the cruise ship emissions issue, how do you distinguish leisure time on a cruise from leisure time setting in front of the TV at home, or road tripping, or a ski trip, etc.? I'm aghast at the tone of this comment.
The various excursions or stops can be fun as well. It’s not for everyone but I see the appeal. Also, it doesn’t cost $10K to get a window.
EDIT: I just price checked a cruise of the Caribbean on the Princess line (didn’t spend time checking the specific ship) but for a 7-day cruise for 2 people, a mini-suite (balcony and more room), and the premier package (unlimited drinks and other stuff) it came out to $3,800 total. If you drop the drinks it comes down about $1K. Now you have to get to the port and back home so factor in flights but that’s not absurd pricing IMHO. And you can get a balcony-only for cheaper as well.
It's a sort of floating Las Vegas, with casinos and other passivities such as (from TFA):
"buffet food, all-inclusive child supervision, shuffleboard, plentiful liquor and winking entertainers"
Of course the scale of the operation could produce significant unhappiness if the cattle are forced to fight for food and live in their own filth, as in the case of the notorious Poop Cruise:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stranded-c...
It seems like the potential applications might make this viable now. Cruise ships are a tiny market when compared to all the dead commercial office space in downtown cores that people wish to convert to residential but can’t because of lack of sunlight and similar reasons.
Apparently the video was recorded in 2014 so they’ve been around for at least 10years now.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Circle-Artificial-Sun...
I've considered setting up mirrors in my garden to redirect sunlight into a shaded room but never quite got it off the ground.
However, I would be really impressed with a lenticular screen so that you get the 6-DoF type of view that would change the paralax view as you moved around the room a bit.
I know three people who've come back sick from cruises. The most interesting one was just last week: someone who had Mal de Débarquement Syndrome for six months. She was dizzy all the time. There is no cure.
This might be a good one to try on your boss if you want to avoid business travel: say you suffer from Mal de Débarquement Syndrome!
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24796-mal-de-...
how do you know all these patients? Or you just made them up?
Assuming and a accusing a commenter is lying directly breaks HN guidelines.
I know three people who've come home sick. He's the one being skeptical and quoting a well-known meme:
I am not skeptical at all that you know three people who got sick on a cruise, but out of the 30+ million people who cruise in a year it's completely meaningless. A CDC study showed that only about 0.18% of cruisers get a stomach bug
I could easily come up with a list of 24+ people who have gone on a cruise and not gotten sick. Why are my dozens less valid than your 3? You can post your anecdata but don't get mad when someone counters it with their own.
I admire your embrace of the “curiosity, not disparagement” principle.
I remember a bunch of cruise ships got sold off during covid.
And we have had some market consolidation in Aus, I think P&O might have pulled a merger and then kept the incoming brand. I think one ship is leaving.
But my anecdotal evidence is weak and region specific.
And presumably numbers bouncing back after the pandemic - and as memories of the pandemic fade.
There was a long period where they couldn't run cruises at all due to social distancing. And a load of ships where the infection spread like wildfire and there was barely any medical care available. And a load of people getting trapped on board ships that weren't allowed into ports, so they couldn't get repatriation flights, and so on.
Measure against those catastrophic years, and I've no doubt demand is increasing!
Well that and seeing the dead woman rolled out + (much) later learning that she had died of a drug overdose during an orgy.
Decades ago I took a couple of Carnival cruises.
Things are not better now. What a shitshow. Royal Caribbean sucked, but Norwegian was a new low. The only word that describes both the en-route experience and the destinations is DISMAL.
At least Royal Caribbean had a pleasant food-court type of dining area, with stations of verious kinds in a dispersed layout that was navigable. Norwegian had only a narrow "racetrack" going around a central core, with serving stations in the wall. It was only a few feet wide, which meant you couldn't move because it was blocked by scooters (a totally predictable situation given the demographics of cruise ships).
Then there was the smoke. WTF. We had an upper cabin with a balcony. Doing 20 knots on the open ocean, we couldn't hang out out there because it was continually inundated with cigarette smoke... and not even from the immediate neighbor. It was mind-boggling. There was also a smoking area right next to a sushi restaurant. And you had to walk through the smoke-ridden casino area on every deck to get anywhere on the boat. At least Royal Caribbean kept that whole giant ashtray confined to a central area on the lower level. Totally fine.
Cruises are absolute shit. You're way better off just going to an all-inclusive resort somewhere, even somewhere cheap.
Did you notify staff? This would almost certainly get remediated or result in reimbursement.
Now that you mention it, though, I wonder what they would have done. Late at night before bed, when you want to hang out and look at the ocean, isn't the time you want to call the steward and wait for someone to come up into your room.
Been cruising for many years and loving it.
Which line do you prefer?
How do explain that so many cruise passengers are repeat customers?
But yeah also, as above, I worked portside for years too. Its just the memories of going aboard that still haunt me.
I talked to a guy who took a week-long cruise that he described as being locked in a prison breathing diesel exhaust. He said there was no place on the ship were you could not smell the exhaust.
Also the ship I was on used seacreatures instead of level numbers. Felt like walking around an app designed with security by obscurity.
Diesel exhaust fume complaints came from suburbs around the wharf.
Just flying to your destination and staying in some nice place is arguably both better for the environment and probably a lot more enjoyable depending on your tastes. Not that flying is particularly good for the environment of course. Or that enjoyable these days. But I wanted to put in context just how nasty cruise ships can be.
The cruise industry threatened to remove Key West from their list of stops, wrote some checks to the various non-profits, and the status quo was preserved.
The cruise ship industry is an ecological disaster, by choice.
Please elaborate.
Plans put in place by previous administrations over the years said that by 2038, waste water dumped into the lake would finally be as close to zero.
The sheer size of these things is hard to comprehend. I'm on vacation at the fancy french riviera and the billionaire's superyachts, when on a bay next to a cruise ship, look like tiny miniature toys. It's just wild. The cruise ships are not just three to five times longer, they're also, way, way, way taller than the superyachts.
You see a cruise ships and it screams "I'm here to destroy the environment".
My wife wanted to try a vacation on a cruise ship but to me it's a big no-no.
A great-uncle of mine lived in Eastern Germany. He bought a pleasure cruiser, about 28 meters length. For everything longer than 25m, he would have needed a captain's patent to operate, so he cut out a bit more than 3m at the rear, fixed up all the wires, pipes and shafts, and then had nice (even if imbalanced-looking) boat.
So he did the opposite of what the article is about :-)
He spent most of his vacations on that boat, cruised up and down the rivers with his family. https://www.ddr-binnenschifffahrt.de/fotogalerie-gross/Passa... you can see that it ends pretty abruptly at the rear.
Chuckle.
On another note, a 2 billion investment to build a ship seems absolutely crazy. How long does it take to make that kind of money back, and how long does a ship need to sail to pay itself back?
* The equivalent is insurance. Insuring a $2B ship carries pretty good due diligence. A ship simply failing is rare. Of course, ship insurance doesn't care about employee rights, safe food, medical care, or other things one might expect to keep people safe. It's about protecting the capital expense. If everyone on the ship dies, but the ship survives, that's okay!
* Welds are quite strong -- it just extends the metal. This is especially true when the baseline quality of the metal is not high.
On something heat-treated SAE AISI 4130 steel (what e.g. fancy steel bicycles are made of), you see significant weakening. There is a heat-affected zone where the normal tempering is taken off, and the joining material isn't the fancy CrMo of the baseline material.
I'm not a nautical engineer, but I doubt cruise ships are made of overly fancy steel. When you're making a 180,000 ton ship, your best bet is to use cheap steel, and if you need more strength, to simply use more of it. A good weld should be every bit as strong as the cheap steel around it, and the heat-affected zone is a lot less important if the steel isn't heat-treated or tempered in any way in the first place. It will harden the steel a bit, of course, but it shouldn't be the same level of impact.
It's also worth noting you already have welds, and things need to be engineered for welds. It's not hard to reinforce the welds. Indeed, on a bike frame, the welds are where the stresses are highest, and you get around that by making the tubes a bit thicker (or, for fancier bikes, thicker just near the welds -- that's what a butted bike tube does).
I think cruises are horrible, horrible things for a whole slew of reasons, but none having to do with the ship sinking Titanic-style.
Example time lapse of another cruise ship being built about a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk_JIHel7To
Depending on the ship, shipyard, and I imagine a host of other factors, you might assemble a ship directly out of the order of ~50-100 blocks, or you might pre-assemble into order of ~10 "mega-blocks" which then get assembled together.
"none having to do with the ship sinking Titanic-style."
It's rare, but not nonexistent. The Costa Concordia springs to mind. Schettino ended up with all the blame, but it did seem to be that there was some degree of institutional incompetence as well. But not with the construction AFAIK
This is very different from "sinking Titanic-style".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster
EDIT: oh hm, maybe you're right; like the Titanic it collided with something and water began to pour in, unlike the Titanic it was close to shore so the whole ship did not sink.
This is not the case at all. A weld almost always weakens the base material. And you don't just use whatever steel is the cheapest to build a ship. You use what is appropriate to the use case. There are cheaper and more expensive options within that category, but you make it sound like you can just grab whatever is cheapest in the yard that day.
There's so much that goes into material selection and handling that this comment confidently hand waves away.
Of course shit welding can cause weakening of the material but thats true of everything. Anything that is worth welding that also is important will use metals that have strong welding properties that make the weld stronger than the base material.
The heat-affected zone is caused by the weld. Ergo, welds to weaken the base metal.
In most cases, this also doesn't matter. I think all but one of the things I've welded, even a bad weld would have been way more than strong enough, and for many, even the tack weld would have held fine. Welds are very, very strong, and it's usually cheap and easy to use sufficiently strong materials that all of this is moot.
But for something like an ultralight bike frame, racing car, or airplane, it is something you do need to worry about.
Wouldn't a fancy bicycle use Reynolds 853 steel? /s
Revenue: 52 weeks of sailing x 5.6k passengers [1] x 1.8k $/week [2] ~= 525m $/year
Costs: Interest [3] 160m $/year + Crew [4] 118m $/year + Hospitality [6] 200m $/year = 478m $/year
Profit ~= 47m $/year or ~9%
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cruise_ships [2] https://www.cruzely.com/heres-how-much-money-cruise-ships-ma... [3] 8% on 2b$ [4] Crew: 50k $/year * 2350 crew [5], just guessing the costs here, including all accomodation + living costs, probably still to high? [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_of_the_Seas [6] Hospitality: 100 $/guest/day? = 52 * 7 * 100 * 5.6k = 200m $/year
However I suspect 8% would be far higher that the rate they'd get.
You'd also have to include maintenence costs, and also the reduction in revenue as it gets older (people will presumably not pay as much to travel on an older ship than a newer one), or the refurb costs you'll need to offset.
On the other hand inflation has to be factored in. At 2% that debt will reduce 30% over the period.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RCL/royal-caribbea...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CCL/carnival/profi...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NCLH/norwegian-cru...
Additionally, it's very rare for a company to own a ship for its entire lifetime.
The way they calculate depreciation now is based on resale value.
I wonder what happens to that in a world where interest rates AREN'T negative in real terms anymore...
Surely, it would have impacted the bottom line by now at at least one of those 3 businesses.
Estimating things is non-trivial.
It's not fraud for your depreciation estimate to be off by a few percentage points.
Banks regularly set their loss provisions artificially low or high to smooth earnings.
But because they live on credit, they were pretty badly hosed during COVID-19.
Some uninformed guessing:
A operational net of $100/passenger/day is 10,000,000 passenger days per billion dollars. That’s 27,000 passenger years.
With an average load of 5000 passengers that’s about five years per billion dollars.
My guess is that average operational net is well above $100/passenger/day because cruising caters to luxury market segments; the scale is vast; people expect to be up sold; and gambling. All with little regulatory oversight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_classification_society
They are unlikely to skimp on this due to the insurance implications.
For those not familiar, "The Finest Hours" by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman recounts the 1952 rescue mission off Cape Cod. In a tragic coincidence, a storm split two different oil tankers in half. Both tankers split as a result of a construction process, at least superficially, similar to the one in TFA.
Step 1: cut a ship in half…
Big economic blocks like the EU and the US should force the cruise ships to operate sustainably and not pollute the literal sh*t out of the port cities they stop at.
One thing I always appreciate about watching these sort ofs things is how much work and people goes into it, like the people repainting the hull and sides of the ship, looks like real hard but honest work and probably comes with a great sense of satisfaction to boot seeing the results of your graft materialize over time.
It’s a stark juxtaposition from these shots of clean, carefully planned and engineered operations in high-tech ports. Shipbreaking is often done freehand, based on experience and intuition, without much in the way of reference documents or safety gear.
My grandfather worked as a welder for a shipyard. I remember him telling me about how they would cut a barge in half, and he and a few other guys would weld in a new chunk that would make the thing longer. This would have been 60ish years ago.
I get all the complaints people have against cruising but for us we have seen so much of the world in relative comfort. The trick is to plan trips around the shore excursions and what experiences you want to have. The ship is just the means to get to those experiences without having to hop on and off airplanes frequently.
This is the sort of thing that tempts me - an enchanting vision, like something out of "Death on the Nile", only minus the death. Just a small floating hotel that takes you to interesting places, not a floating amusement park combined with buffet.
It's like the difference between back-country camping and going to Animal Kingdom.
Don't see how you can make that determination. All those people are flying to Tromso or whatever anyway to get on the boat. And the boat is an ecological disaster. Plus the boat belching out 1000s of people into Longyearbyen is a mess for the people there. They don't stay in the hotels or go on the tours provided by local tour operators, hurting the local economy.
There's a reason why Svalbard is currently imposing sweeping regulation on cruise ships. They are not a plus for the archipelago or the community. Just like everywhere else cruise ships operate, they serve mostly to capture as much as the financial upside from tourism as possible while leaving as little on the plate for the locals as possible, while dumping them with externalities.
They will know exactly how much water they used down to the quart, same with diesel. They will have very tight energy budgets as well and track it by the watt hour. Their energy will likely come from renewable sources.
Instead of daily hot showers, on a small boat you get a cold salt water shower every few days with a pint of fresh water at the end to rinse.
So, in conclusion, doubtful.
The first ships that were welded would suddenly break in two. These were the liberty ships used in WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
These incidents are what led to the creation of the field of materials science.
(Wikipedia link above.)
Plenty of crimes happen at sea. Cruise companies expend effort to sweep these crimes under the carpet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nCT8h8gO1g
Criminals are people who've been convicted of a crime. These people are either:
- allowed on cruises (I'm not aware of a "no conviction" clause when buying a cruise ticket)
- in jail, in which case you can also make the argument they're not allowed out in public
So criminals are allowed on board, and people who might commit a crime are not necessarily criminals yet.
Now apparently there's a second ship trying the same business model, "Villa Vie Odyssey". Predictably, the marketing suggests it's the first one ever of its kind.
Annual carrying costs coming to 30% of the purchase price.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/is-living-on-a-cruise-...
Also I would think diseases spread pretty easily on ships.
"'B' is for Buy N Large, your very best friend."
If one is going to watch sea life, dive etc, then it makes some sense.
I honestly don’t understand the appeal
Other than that, I don't understand it either, especially since you're just stuck on the boat for the majority of the time.
Why can’t modern cruises just be like the Love Boat on tv?
