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Royal Caribbean Guests Can Now Pre-reserve their Specialty Restaurant Experience http://www.cruise-reviews.com/news/newsdetail.asp?FNewsID=1937 Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:00:00 GMT CherieRelease Date: 4/29/2008Freedom of the Seas will be the first available ship to pre-reserve specialty restaurants with full roll out to the rest of the fleet over the next few months. What Happens At Sea Stays At Sea: http://www.cruise-reviews.com/news/newsdetail.asp?FNewsID=1935 Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:00:00 GMT Amy HillRelease Date: 4/28/2008<img src='http://www.cruise-reviews.com/newsimages/crew.jpg' align='left'> <h3>Confessions Of A Cruise Ship Crew Morale Booster</h3> Remember Julie from the Love Boat? The bubbly brunette whose job it was to keep passengers’ spirits high on the high seas? There’s a good reason for pep-me-up positions on cruise ships, and that counts below the deck, too. While they’re busy quaffing champagne and enjoying midnight buffets and impromptu bingo games, what most cruise passengers don’t know is that the smiling service personnel catering to their every whim aren’t exactly living the high life down in the crew’s quarters. We talked to a former Crew Welfare Chairman from a major Caribbean ship about what goes on away from the main passenger areas, and the hard job of keeping an international crew happy-at-sea when the going gets choppy. The view from his porthole is eye-opening -- and one that those of us on the upper decks couldn’t even pay to get. His Job Description: I was working on a cruise ship as a video guy when I got the job of Crew Welfare Chairman. It was a part-time gig, pretty much like being frat boy president. I was given a budget of $14,000 per month to keep the crew happy, so I came up with ideas like holding raffles where people could win iPods, organizing big parties with lots of beer and DJs, stuff like that. Once we hired a private island out for a crew party. But normally it was smaller stuff, like bingo games. Most of the crew really loved bingo because by the third round you could win up to $1,500 -- that’s a big bonus for our meager salaries, so there were some serious competitors. The Crew: The ship I worked on made 10-day runs from New York to the Caribbean -- mostly the US Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and British Virgin Islands. It’s basically a three to one ratio on cruise ships of passengers to crew, so we had about 1,200 crewmembers on our ship. There were only about 20 Americans, and they were mostly working as entertainers. I’d say 80 percent of the crew were from other countries and were making money to send home to their families. Crew Quarters: It’s a whole other world below the main passenger decks. Most of the crew lived in the decks just below sea level. I was lucky because I only had one roommate. But some people were bunked up with as many as eight others in one room. Doesn’t make for a lot of privacy. Sometimes we’d try to have after parties once the crew bar had closed for the night, so we’d cram a bunch of people in our little cabins, our mini fridges stocked with beer, and play music on our laptops. But since there was no space, you’d basically be lying down in the top bunk drinking beer and trying to have a party. There was the mess hall where we all ate, and a crew bar on Deck 5 that was open every night where we’d pay 75 cents for the same beer passengers were shelling out $5.50 for. We had a video rental store and a little convenience store. We even had a crew pool – this dinky little pool on deck nine that looked like a hot tub. All these pretty girls would be out there taking their tops off trying to get rid of their tanlines. On the ship, I was the equivalent of middle class -- with my video job I was allowed to drink with passengers on the main decks. But why would I drink expensive beers in the passenger areas when I could be hanging out at the crew bar and downing 75-cent beers? Crew Morale: I don’t think people realize that most of the crew are on the ship for 10 months straight and they don’t have a day off. A day off to the crew usually means not having to work the morning shift, which will happen maybe once during a 10-day cruise -- so it means that there’s one day where they don’t have to get up at 6AM. Those people working as waitstaff, cooks or in the engine room, they’re putting in 70 to 75-hour workweeks. People have this false idea that working on a cruise ship is so cool - you stop in these ports and get to hang out in exotic paces - but really you usually only have about two hours in port, and what most of our crew would do then was run off and find payphones to call their families back in South America or Asia. A lot of them were married with kids and hadn’t seen their husbands or wives in two years - that’s how much they were working. Keeping morale up was tough -- I would organize these big parties at least once a cruise and not even everyone would turn out because they were just so exhausted from working so hard. For me, there were good days and bad days on the ship. Sometimes in New York, the higher ups wouldn’t let the crew off the ship. They would come up with some stupid excuse like that we were getting inspected - they are always nervous the foreign people will jump ship and they’ll get fined. So I would get stuck on the ship and it was really a downer. You’re working in a room without windows and asking yourself why you’re doing this. You do see a lot of places, but it’s not how people think -- the spots kind of come and go. Even when I was able to get off in New York or other ports, we usually only had about five hours before we had to be back on the boat -- so it was like you had a time bomb ticking in the back of your head. And it seemed like every couple weeks, another crew privilege would be taken away from us. First it would be a special snack food item, then they’d raise the price of Coronas. You started to wonder when it was going to end. I wonder if I went back to that same ship if they would even be having crew parties anymore. What Happens At Sea Stays At Sea: I’d been on the ship for two weeks, and developed this huge crush on a girl. We were spending a lot of time together, hanging out at the crew bar, then the tech director told me, “You can’t get any closer to her -- the cruise director has a thing for her, and if he finds out you’re hitting on her you’re going to get fired.” Something like eight other people told me the same thing. So that was it, I just stopped talking to her. There’s definitely a class system on ships -- the people who make a career out of working on cruise ships and have the connections, they defend their turf fiercely against those of us who are just doing it for a year or two as a way to see the world. The people who actually live on the cruise ship for years with no end in sight, they have their own little club. And they really run things. Jumping Ship: The longer you’re on the ship, the more you start to lose all your land contacts. I worried that I would become that guy who never left, so the first opportunity I had to leave, I took it. Now I think about the time on the cruise ship as being some of the greatest times ever for the high highs and lows -- the camaraderie and the crazy experiences.