I had never been on a large cruise ship before. After twelve days on board, I know quite a few things I wish someone had told me before I booked. Not because the cruise was bad, but because cruising turned out to be something completely different from what I had imagined.
I suppose I had pictured the sea, new cities, good food, a bit of sunshine, perhaps a glass of wine on deck at sunset, and that pleasant feeling of waking up somewhere new every morning. I’m sure all of that exists. But so do the queues, the cards, the apps, the assigned dining times, the drinks packages, the photographers, the shops, the casino, the bingo, the excursions, and a rather impressive industry designed to make it possible for thousands of people to be on holiday at the same time.
A cruise is not just a journey. It is an entire system. And it is noisy. Especially when the bingo announcements start booming through loudspeakers all over the ship. I am definitely not interested in bingo.
Let me start with what is genuinely brilliant
Let me start with what is genuinely brilliant.
You board the ship, unpack your suitcase once, and you do not have to touch it again until it is time to go home. While you sleep, your hotel moves, and you wake up in a new port.
You can have breakfast, go ashore, come back a few hours later and find your cabin cleaned. Mine was serviced twice a day. It was spotless. I always had plenty of towels, a hairdryer and a made bed. All the practical things worked remarkably well.
And perhaps this is cruising’s greatest strength. Someone else has taken care of the logistics. No changing hotels. No trains. No airports. No checking in again and again. No dragging suitcases up and down stairs. The world comes to you. I can completely understand why people love it.
But you are also living inside a machine
But you are also living inside a machine.
It did not take me many hours to notice that side of it. There are a lot of people. A lot. They all have to eat, drink, squeeze into the swimming pool among shoals of other human beings, watch shows, go ashore, come back, find a table, find an empty chair, find a sunbed and move through the same areas at roughly the same time.
That means queues. It means noise. It means thousands of people wanting to do the same things at once. The buffet could feel more like an enormous canteen than a restaurant. The sunbeds were packed together. The lifts were so crowded that I often took the stairs instead. It was usually quicker.
I also discovered quite quickly that I missed something I had never thought about before booking. A place where I could simply be. Not eat. Not drink. Not be entertained. Not buy anything. Just sit somewhere comfortable.
I found a couple of lounges with decent chairs, but there I was expected to order drinks. Coffee was not available. And, strictly speaking, I think the lounges I found may have been intended for club members. It struck me how much of the ship was built around activity, alcohol and consumption, and how little of it was built around silence and a good conversation.
Then there was the drinks package
Of course we had bought one. It seemed sensible. Then most things would be taken care of. Or so we thought. It gradually became clear that the package had a logic of its own. In some places it applied. In others it did not. A drink could be included in one bar and cost quite a lot extra in one of the more popular bars.
But the most absurd thing for me was the water. At home, I easily drink around two litres of water a day. On the ship, we used up our water allowance far more quickly than I had expected. Alcohol, on the other hand, seemed to be remarkably easy to obtain.
After a while, I started thinking that it was easier to get a drink than a perfectly ordinary bottle of cold water. Perhaps other people would not react to this at all. I did.
And I have to admit that I also felt a certain pressure to drink. Not from the other passengers, but from the system itself. It was difficult to sit down in certain places without being asked fairly quickly what you wanted to order. Quite often, I only wanted coffee. Or water. Apparently, those were not always the most exciting orders, and you could feel it.
«All Inclusive» is an interesting expression
A cruise can create the impression that everything is included, but there are many layers sitting on top of the basic fare. Excursions, speciality restaurants, spa treatments, massage, skincare, shops, bingo, casino and photographs.
And there were certainly plenty of photographers. They seemed to take pictures constantly, and later the photographs appeared already printed and waiting for us to buy them. Eventually, I almost started sneaking past the photographers.
Then there was the internet. I paid around 170 euros for Wi-Fi and still had very poor reception or none at all. My friend paid 130 euros and experienced the same thing. Paying more did not give me better access.
For me, as someone who works digitally and is used to being online, this was frustrating. For another passenger, being unreachable for a few days might be a blessing. Once again, we are different.
The foof wasn´t bad
That is important to say. There was plenty of it. All the time. But after a few days, a lot of it began to taste rather similar. I missed seasoning. Salt and pepper were usually on the table, and I caught myself longing for something that really tasted of something.
Eventually, I realised that my problem was not that the food was bad. It was simply being produced for a very large number of people. And that is something different. When thousands of people have to be fed every day, every meal cannot be a small, personal restaurant experience. This is food production on a large scale. Impressively efficient, but not necessarily intimate or particularly flavourful.
The evening came
Then evening came, and this was where something interesting happened.
Although much of life on board could exhaust me during the day, I often genuinely looked forward to the theatre in the evening. The shows were among the best parts of the entire trip. We saw wonderful dance performances, acrobatics, rock concerts, pop concerts, magic, tenors and classical singing.
I liked some things more than others. I actually walked out of one performance because I thought the singer was so bad that I simply could not listen any longer. But overall, the entertainment was impressively professional.
And I became fascinated by the dancing couples. During the day, couples could take dance classes and learn new steps. In the evening, they would turn up again and practise. Some of them became really good. And perhaps more importantly, they looked as though they were having a wonderful time together.
I almost began studying them. There was something lovely about couples who were actually doing something together, learning something together and laughing together. They seemed happier than some of the couples who simply sat at tables looking in opposite directions.
So if you love dancing, enjoy shows and thrive on social activity, I can absolutely understand why a cruise could be perfect for you.
My biggest problem was not the food. Not even the queues. It was the lack of peace and quiet.
I slept over a liveband
I had an inside cabin with no window. I could probably have lived quite happily with that. The problem was that my cabin was directly above a venue with live music. When I lay in bed after midnight, I could hear exactly which song they were playing. Not just the thump of the bass. I could hear what they were singing.
The music could continue until around half past midnight. After a few nights, my body began to object. I became tired, dizzier and more irritable. And that was when I truly understood how important cabin location is.
If I ever booked another cruise, I would study the deck plan as though I were buying a house. What is above the cabin? What is below it? Where are the nightclubs? Where are the restaurants? Where are the stages? This is not a minor detail. It can determine your entire holiday.
And then you go ashore
This was the part I liked best. Suddenly, the doors opened and we could get out. Vigo. Paris. Málaga. Alicante. Barcelona. Marseille. Savona.
That was when my desire to travel came alive again. I like walking. Finding a street I had never planned to enter. Sitting down at a café. Talking to someone. Taking a wrong turn. Finding something that was never on the programme.
In Málaga, I started out on my own and eventually ran into our young guide. We ended up drinking sangria together at a little pavement café. It was one of my favourite days of the entire trip, perhaps because the day had not been fully organised in advance. It was allowed to develop.
And that was when I began to realise that travelling itself was not the problem. Quite the opposite. I love travelling. I just do not necessarily enjoy having the entire journey pre-packaged for me.
But for other people, that is exactly the point.
I met people who absolutely loved it. People who had been on many cruises before. They knew the system. They knew when to eat, where to sit and which activities they wanted to join. Some barely went ashore.
At first, I found that strange. Imagine sailing all the way to Barcelona and then staying on the ship? But then I realised that for them, the ship was not the transport taking them to their holiday. The ship was the holiday.
They wanted the food, the sunshine, the shows, the dancing and the sense of security. Perhaps they had no desire at all to spend part of the day working out how the Marseille Metro works.
We did. And we actually thought it was rather fun once we had cracked the code.
Perhaps that is the fundamental difference. I like the freedom of figuring things out for myself. Other people like the freedom of not having to figure things out for themselves. Neither is more correct than the other, but it is useful to know which kind of person you are before you book.
The Pasients
And then there were what I started calling “the patients”.
Not because they were ill. But because our young guide gradually seemed less like a tour guide and more like a combination of nurse, mother, travel coordinator and emergency helpline.
She was 26. This was her first trip as the responsible guide on a cruise like this, and it may even have been her first cruise. She was certainly thrown in at the deep end.
When does the bus leave? Where is the toilet? How long are we staying here? Where are we meeting? When are we eating? Why weren’t we told this earlier? Why is there no price list for the minibar? Why aren’t we being served potatoes with dinner? Why do we have to leave tips for the waiter and the person cleaning the cabin when we have already paid 1,200 kroner to the tour operator for tips? Which bars are not included in the drinks package?
That last one was my question.
And sometimes the questions came in a tone that made me wonder just how perfect these people had been during the first week of their own first job.
There was a lot of complaining. Not only about her, but about the food, the timings, the buses, the information and small things that did not happen exactly as someone had imagined they would. The guide was unclear. Unsure. Uninterested. Invisible. She did not hold the flag high enough when we were moving around in a group. And so on.
It actually affected the atmosphere around the tables. I could sit there thinking that we were in Spain, France or Italy, on holiday, with our meals being served and our beds being made, and yet the conversation around the table could revolve around everything that was not functioning quite perfectly.
Eventually I began wondering whether this, too, is part of the fully organised holiday. When somebody else has promised to arrange everything for us, perhaps we begin expecting them to arrange absolutely everything.
We do not need to find our own way. We do not need to check when the bus leaves. We do not even need to know exactly where we are. But that also makes us rather dependent on somebody else telling us what is going to happen.
And when information is missing, or plans change, frustration comes quickly.
I felt almost the opposite. The more I managed to organise for myself, the freer I felt. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed the days when I simply walked off the ship and figured out the city for myself.
Would I actually go on another cruise like this?
Would I actually go on another large cruise like this?
Probably not without beeing payed a good salary.
Not because the trip was a failure. Not because Costa Diadema is a huge ship with too many people on board. Not because of all the uncomfortable plastic chairs. But because the holiday format itself simply did not suit me very well.
I experienced places I had never seen before. I saw some excellent shows. I met funny and interesting people. I travelled with a good friend and made two new friends on board. I had some absolutely wonderful days ashore.
But I also discovered something quite important about myself. I need more peace and quiet than I realised. I need somewhere I can sit without anyone expecting me to buy something. I need time to get to know a place, at least a little. And I prefer being able to change my plans without checking what time the ship is sailing.
So for me, cruising became less a holiday I fell in love with and more a fascinating journey of discovery into a form of travel I had never experienced before.
And perhaps that is precisely why I am glad I did it. Because now I know what a cruise really is.
It is a hotel, transport, entertainment, restaurants, shopping, a sunshine holiday, excursions and logistics, all compressed into one floating world.
For some people, it must be fantastic.
I mostly longed to go ashore.