I used to be pretty high up in IT at royal Caribbean / Celebrity.
I would go on about 3 weeks of cruises per year to babysit some project install.
Living on a ship is interesting. It can be like ground hog day. Same itineraries over and over... look kids Big Ben! Muster drill first day. Safety drills constantly.
The crew food is NOT the same as passengers. That is why you see officers, activity directors, etc eating at the buffets during slow times. The quarters are obnoxiously small.
The only good thing is the crew bar drinks are practically free by our standards. The bad thing is they make so little that it is relative.
On top of all that there is a definite set of social classes on these ships... it is like a huge school. The shore ex guys are jocks. The performer girls are the hot girls. The casino guys are cynical bad boys. The kids club people are a little weird. And they all look down on the Philippinos that do the grunt work.
That is obviously a huge generalization. But it seemed to hold on most ships.
Finally, the pay is tiny because of the room and board angle. That is why so many of the worker bees come from poor countries.
Just curious, but RCLs website remains a hot mess since they upgraded it back in March. Any idea on whats going on behind the scenes with that? I know that the CEO has addressed the problems, but the problems remain. Lots of complaints from customers on getting access to their booking information or losing their information and having to reconstruct it with customer service reps over the phone.
Seems like a company that can build world class, state of the art mega cruise ships would be able to properly design, beta test and launch their website with few hiccups.