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Cruises hit a spot of: * All the fun and "not thinking" of an all-inclusive resort (though obviously only if you pay for the drink packages) on land * General
by icegreentea2 2y ago
Cruises hit a spot of:
* 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.
- chasil 2y agoThe big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work. 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.
- School-Cotton 2y agoWhy not just not answer your phone while on vacation?
- msrenee 2y agoPresumably because of pressure from superiors. If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy. If you're simply unable to receive communications, that's just the way it is. It shouldn't be like that, but it is.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- GJim 2y ago> If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy. 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.
- ryandrake 2y agoThis is not an "American" thing. I'm American, and I would never, ever, ever in any known universe within the multiverse, bring my work phone with me on a vacation, let alone answer it or do work stuff. And, I would never give anyone at work my personal phone number. Strict separation of work and personal, and never the twain shall meet. We should not accept jobs that keep you on the leash even during your vacation and after working hours, unless on-call is agreed-to part of your official duties.
- ghaff 2y agoI mean, vacation is vacation. I've also agreed to do interviews and such if I'm on vacation and it's convenient. I may also have glanced at email from time to time and sent a quick response to something with the proviso that I'm on vacation.
- hgomersall 2y agoNot intending this to be snarky, but do you not have friends you meet at work? Is it a case of your friends knowing not to call your for work reasons?
- ryandrake 2y agoA few from past jobs, and they're welcome to call if they want to do personal/social stuff together, but they are not welcome to call because the build is broken or they need me to do a database roll back because production is down.
- jkestner 2y ago"Bring work to your whole self."
- chasil 2y agoBecause I was enjoying myself on Bourbon Street. That is time that I paid for that they took from me. I will never get it back.
- daelon 2y agoYou should reread the comment you replied to.
- raverbashing 2y agoAirplane mode exists, as much as people don't pay attention to the security briefings anymore
- dpifke 2y agoSomeday, I hope the FAA will catch on that it's a safety issue that the incessant droning on about shit-tier credit card programs is training people to ignore cabin crew announcements.
- bosie 2y agoSeparate your work and personal phone? It seems not the healthiest of companies to work for. If you can’t set boundaries, might need help by using. A second phone
- wpearse 2y agoMy colleagues and I put the work line on an eSIM so we can turn the work “phone” off completely with a toggle in the Settings app. (If anyone from Apple is reading this, would be great to be able to schedule DND on a eSIM line.)
- Scoundreller 2y agoShould be able to do that through shortcuts and automation? 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/automation_to_enable_and_disable_esim/ 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?
- NBJack 2y agoThat certainly sounds like an express lane to burnout. 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.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoThis is a fading benefit. The ship I took this summer had free Starlink connections powering their WiFi. It wasn’t great for calls and they blocked video, but texting was possible. (You had to be careful though because they also exploitatively ran a mobile cellular microcell that charged insane data roaming fees, which meant you had to be very careful about when you turned on roaming.)
- ghaff 2y agoNever tried doing a Zoom call, but the trans-Atlantic crossing I did in the the spring, I didn't pay for video streaming but Starlink at $20/day was pretty good for Internet generally. Was tempted to unplug but I didn't. Kept my phone on airplane mode the whole time.
- protocolture 2y agoWe used to run an exploitative cruise ship terminal internet cafe where people would pay dollars for access to minutes of like, yahoo and msn messengers so really nothings changed.
- badpun 2y agoTell me you live in the US without telling me you live in the US...
- ska 2y ago"The big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work." 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.
- protocolture 2y agoMy sister in law brings her work phone everywhere and then finds the spot in the house with no signal and just leaves it there for hours on end. I can see it.
- lupire 2y agoShow her the Airplane Mode button?
- dylan604 2y ago> Get to skip out on flight to the Caribbean/Mexico 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.
- watsocd 2y agoThere are many Americans who are terrified of flying into a foreign city. With a cruise out of Miami, they never have to step on foreign soil.
- giantg2 2y agoIt can provide many benefits beyond people who are terrified. All sorts of barriers and annoyances can be avoided, such as managing passports, bringing medications, language barriers, differences in legal rights, dealing with customs, etc. This is even more impactful if you're traveling with kids or the elderly.
- toast0 2y agoYou still need a passport for most cruises. All the big cruises are non-US flagged with non-US crews and make a stop, if briefly, in a non-US port. 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.
- giantg2 2y agoYes,for most cruises. There are some domestic ones.
- tssva 2y agoUS Customs and Border only require a birth certificate and government issued id for US citizens re-entering the US on closed-loop cruises. A closed-loop cruise is defined as a cruise leaving and returning from the same port in the US. This is the vast majority of cruises from the US. 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.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago> all-inclusive resorts... 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.
- nullstyle 2y agoThere’s a different kind of serendipity that comes with Cruise vacations as opposed to road tripping, but it’s still very much there. Furthermore, I can’t really have a road trip experience with 16 people in my travel group; If we want to be together, we’ll be stuck, packed into a van. I can have a great cruise experience with a group that size on a cruise or at a resort. 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.
- aj7 2y agoSerendipity on cruises, eh? The axiom of cruises is: You will never see these people again.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoDo people go cruising to make long term friends?
- tssva 2y agoI have plenty of long term friends, but I have never done any activity with the explicit goal of gainng them. That being said I have made long term friends on cruises.
- giantg2 2y ago"I can’t really have a road trip experience with 16 people in my travel group" Convoys work for this. Perhaps even more fun if they're fun cars with a lower car to passenger ratio.
- halfmatthalfcat 2y agoExcept, everyone is flying to Miami instead which isn't cheap. Also, until only recently, drinking was ala carte which was a massive, not included, expense. 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.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoWhile some of that rings true, I'd say it was still worth it to get off the boat and enjoy the islands. They are beautiful places with their own rich culture and history, despite the over tourism.
- VoodooJuJu 2y ago[flagged]
- ryandrake 2y agoIt's also currently fashionable to describe any mixing of Western people/money/enterprise with the developing world as "colonial." I don't think many people actually think they're King George III as they enjoy a vacation in the Bahamas.
- immibis 2y agoThey're talking about the obvious racial segregation: the white people are to be treated like kings, and the brown people are there to do the treating.
- ryandrake 2y agoI don't really see how doing a little shopping when the ship comes into port or while staying at a foreign resort equates to being treated like a king because of your skin color. My wife is from what we might call a developing country. When we go back to her home city to visit family, we'll occasionally go out to a store or eat at a restaurant, and while there, we're served by... brown people! Which makes sense because there are many, many brown people there. Am I supposed to feel bad about "colonizing" her city, just because I'm white? It's not even something I notice. I guess I just don't get this odd American insistence on framing every interaction in terms of a power dynamic based on people's skin color.
- immibis 2y agoThe fact remains that there is a pattern of brown people being made to serve white people's every whim. When brown people take cruises to white people countries as often as white people take cruises to brown people countries, then it's excusable with "of course there are brown people in a brown people country" but when it mostly only happens one way around, that's a sign of how our society operates.
- jrm4 2y agoNo mention yet of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again?" by David Foster Wallace? 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."
- water-data-dude 2y agoBehold, I have found the source! Original title was “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” but then it was given a new title when it was included in the short story collection “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- teqsun 2y agoYou're missing an important intersection: you can get on a closed-loop cruise from the US without a passport and with a criminal record. 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.