Cruise Ships Suck.
(6 minute read)
We spent a week in Split last June, and every single day, they came.
Cruise ships would arrive and empty thousands of people into the old town, and there was no avoiding them. They filled the tours. They took up all the space. They took their pictures inside a Roman palace that people have been living in for seventeen centuries, and they left their garbage behind, and then the horn would sound and they would go.
That last part is what we keep thinking about. The garbage stayed and they didn't. Split cleaned up after people who had already sailed.
We have a lot to say about the cruise industry and none of it is generous. But the first thing we want to say isn't about the fuel, or the water, or the crew, though we'll get to all three.
The first thing is simpler, and it's about the passengers. They were missing out, and they had no idea.
What a Week Buys You
Here's what happened to us while the ships were coming and going.
There's a bar in one of the ancient stone corridors of the old town called Leopold's. Its terrace, if you can dignify it with the word, is a run of booth seating set along the wall on ancient steps, so the tables stagger downward away from the door, and nothing is level, and it's perfect.
We went the first night, and then we kept going back, and that's really the whole story. We got to know the bartender, whose name I've lost, which I'm not proud of, and we'd stand outside with him and smoke when it wasn't busy while he complained about tourists. He especially disliked the French, and he had his reasons. Split's tourism industry runs on tips, and France doesn't have a tipping culture, and the young French travelers passing through were not, let's say, the country's finest ambassadors. It's the sort of thing you only ever learn by standing outside a bar in a tourist town with the man who's been serving tourists all summer and has developed opinions.
By the second or third night we'd become regulars, and that's when we met Leopold himself, and his wife. We ended up spending the entire evening with them. At some point he insisted on rakia (Croatian fruit brandy), which you do not decline, and when his bar closed he took us to a nightclub.
We went back every night for the rest of the trip.
There was another bar near where we were staying, Šetač Bar, where we'd stop for a negroni before dinner. By the third evening, the server was bringing them out as we arrived. On the house.
And we ate some of the best meals of our lives in that city. Not one of them was on a ship.
The Ship Sails at Four
None of that was available to the thousands of people photographing the palace.
Not because they were bad tourists, though some of them were, and not because they lacked curiosity. Because it is structurally impossible. You cannot become a regular in four hours. You cannot meet the owner on the second night if there is no second night. Nobody takes you dancing at midnight when your ship pulled out at four in the afternoon, and no server on earth is bringing you a free negroni because he recognizes you, because he will never see you again, and he knows it, and so do you.
The horn is not an unfortunate side effect of the cruise. The horn is the product. The entire model requires you back on board, buying drinks, sleeping in a cabin you've already paid for, eating a dinner already accounted for. The ship has to sail. And the consequence, which will never appear in the brochure, is that every port becomes a stage set you look at for an afternoon and leave forever.
Everything we believe about travel says the good part comes from the part you didn't schedule. The empty afternoon. The invitation you were free to accept. The place you went back to because you liked it, at the cost of the place you'd meant to see instead.
A cruise takes that entire category of experience and makes it unavailable. Not discouraged. Not harder. Unavailable, by design, for the duration of your holiday.
That's what it costs you. And honestly, that's not even the worst of it.
And Now the Rest of It
We're a travel agency, not a marine research institute, so we'll be brief and we'll be accurate, and you can follow the sources yourself.
The fuel. Most large cruise ships still burn heavy fuel oil, which is essentially what's left after the refinery has made everything useful. It's cheap and it's filthy. Investigations by the German environmental group NABU and by Channel 4's Dispatches found that a single large ship can emit as much particulate matter in a day as roughly a million cars.
The water. Ships discharge greywater, sewage, bilge water, and food waste. Princess Cruises was fined $40 million for deliberately dumping oily waste and then covering it up, which remains one of the largest ocean-pollution penalties ever levied against a company that sells vacations.
The crew. Staff are recruited overwhelmingly from lower-income countries, work months without a day off, and are employed under the labor law of whatever flag of convenience the ship happens to fly. In 2020, when the world stopped, thousands of them were stranded at sea for months.
And no, there isn't a good one. This is the part where an article like this usually tells you which operator is doing it responsibly, and we can't, because there isn't one. The greenwashing is comprehensive and it is thin. Scrubbers, recycling programs, the retirement of the plastic straw. None of it touches the shape of the business, which is a floating city burning residual fuel to deliver ten thousand people to a UNESCO site for six hours.
You cannot compost your way out of this.
We're Not Here to Tell You That You Had a Bad Time
My parents went on an Alaskan cruise, about twenty years ago, and they loved it. That's true, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to sit here and tell people who enjoyed something that they didn't.
But we'd be lying if we said we were neutral, and we're not going to soften this to keep everybody comfortable. We think the industry is indefensible, we won't plan around it, and if cruising is your thing, we're probably not your travel agency. That's fine. There's a lot of ocean and a lot of us.
What we'd say to anyone still deciding is this. Go somewhere. Stay a week. Find the bar with the charm, and go back on the second night, and the third, and the fourth, until the man behind the bar knows what you drink and starts telling you what it's really like to live there.
They're all still out there, incidentally, the ships. Coming in at dawn, leaving at four, thousands of people at a time.
They think they've been to Croatia.
Tell us we're wrong. If you've cruised and loved it, we actually want to hear what you got out of it, and specifically what you saw that we're claiming you couldn't have. We'll publish it either way.