Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

I once worked for a Cruise Company for some months. I really am shocked at how naive I was back then, when I applied and worked there.

Back then I had no idea how bad this form of travel is for the environment, for the visited cities, for the people working below deck, and so on.

The people I worked with in the main office of the company were really energetic, loved their product, had a great time launching ship after ship (every year a new ship was launched). It was great working with people who loved what they were doing. Compared to other jobs I had till then. I was there when the new hyped prototype was being put into service. Quite an interesting time. We were allowed to test travel on the new ship. It was a cool experience.

From a purely hedonistic perspective. Yeah it felt nice sitting in the sauna, ten decks above see at 6am in the morning and looking out over the waves. It was purely relaxing.

But from a more conscious perspective it was doing everything I could to help destroy this world - and I was so abusing the lower deck people. The ones never being seen by guests. They work horrible shifts, are employed with contracts from the tax heaven states the ships are being registered in.

I was an employee of the same company - but I had massive employment protections and laws governing how long I work, what is considered overtime, and so on. The served me, made my bed, put coffee on my table. They prepared my food - but they were third or fourth class "citizens" on this ship.

I am ashamed looking at it nowadays.

First word, third world clash in the service industry is real but you should not react with emotion only.

What you need to consider is the opportunity cost for those workers. Opportunity cost = (return of best alternative not taken) - (return of a chosen option). If the work at cruise company is the best opportunity for the low paid Filipino worker, you should just be generally horrified how hard the life in third world is. 14-16 hours of hard work per day in a ship may be better than even harder lower paying work in some factory.

This is separate issue from pure exploitation and abuse where even the low wages are not paid on time, agreements are not kept and more work is assigned without extra compensation.

"pure exploitation and abuse" happens to foreign cruise ship workers all the time and is exceptionally well documented.

Please provide a link to the aforementioned exceptional documentation.

https://story.californiasunday.com/below-deck

"How bad this form of travel is for... the visited cities"

I was holidaying in Split, Croatia when the MS Queen Elizabeth [1] docked and thousands of people descended onto the city from it.

The quiet city became absolutely packed with tour groups from the ship, completely ruined the atmosphere.

I guess the cruise tourists do bring in quite a bit of money from eating in the restaurants, buying souvenirs etc, so not that much of a negative for the locals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Queen_Elizabeth

"I guess the cruise tourists do bring in quite a bit of money from eating in the restaurants"

Aren't most cruise ship full board?

Plus you seem to suggest that visitor numbers are very lumpy which would make it very difficult to size the local restaurant industry. If average summer visitors are 10000, then the QE2 dumps out 20000 visitors for 2 days out of the month, do you size yourself to accommodate 10000 visitors? 30000?

Source: Worked in pubs that hosted coach parties, there was a massive variation in spend from coach to coach.

Yes, most of them are full board. But you just don't want to go back to the ship only for lunch, so you have lunch in the city, where you can have a taste of the local cuisine.

Potentially.

I suspect there's a lot of cultural and generational norms wrapped up in that though. A ship full of Swedes may prefer to return to the boat to eat, a ship full of Spaniards may all want 3 course meals on land, that just makes it harder for the host city to predict demand.

At least for the Company I worked for - most people left on "harbor days". Be it for guided tours, beach days or other events or just plain "I am exploring on my own". Most have to be back in the late afternoon/early evening - so that the cruise-liner can depart on time.

So at least for this company most people did not incur food costs on board for lunch (non the less having paid for it with the package deal).

As we all know: Building for spiky traffic is the hardest.

Unlike with cloud computing where you can spin up more servers to meet demand, you can't just spin up more city, more streets, more restaurants, more sights, more everything at the drop of a hat when demand spikes. I wonder how much of that traffic spike from a big cruise ship the city is actually able to capture.

If the city was built for peak demand, maybe, but then you'd have to maintain all the infrastructure when the tourists aren't there. So unless you have a new cruise ship every day ...

It's a hard problem. I don't think it's solvable. I'm in Venice right now and the difference between 1pm when it's jam packed with tourists and a total hellhole on earth, and a nice 7am run when it's empty and gorgeous ... yeah it does not even begin to compare. These old cities just weren't built for the kind of foot traffic they get these days as tourist destinations.

> I'm in Venice right now and the difference between 1pm when it's jam packed with tourists and a total hellhole on earth, and a nice 7am run when it's empty and gorgeous ... yeah it does not even begin to compare.

In the case of Venice often you just to avoid the streets that connect turistic POIs. Take a parallel calle 50 metres on the right or left and suddenly you are in a oasis with few tourists and peaceful silence.

> The quiet city became absolutely packed with tour groups from the ship, completely ruined the atmosphere

Did you ask the locals what they thought of it? Their city isn't your private quiet getaway. Maybe they wanted the ship there. Or maybe they didn't. But that is their choice and their local government is free to prevent the ship from docking if that's the kind of policy they want to institute.

I talked to some of the locals, very mixed opinions although many saw the benefits to the economy of these big groups. Also governments will not always do what locals want as they might stand more to benefit from ships than the locals.

> I guess the cruise tourists do bring in quite a bit of money from eating in the restaurants, buying souvenirs etc, so not that much of a negative for the locals.

"Locals" aren't a homogenous group. The city budget does benefit, and so do people working in businesses serving tourists directly - restaurants, gift shops, hotels, ticket offices, etc. Everyone else hates it. Tourism, especially of intermittent kind, disrupts regular life of regular people.

It's also somewhat ironic that a tourist complained that other tourists ruined the vibe once they've arrived, and concluded that everyone else but him was the problem.

Meanwhile, no word from the locals who are living their life catering to those tourists.

There are so many people in this thread and other like it doing the exact same thing. There was a thread a few months ago about Venetian people getting priced out by airBnbs taking over all the housing and destroying the culture, but the chief complaints on HN were from other tourists complaining about cruise goers crowding up the sites.

A few years ago me and my parents wanted to take a cruise in the Baltic making several 1-2 day stops and I have to say I felt the same way.

The ship was massive and had pools, a restaurant, live entertainment but it was obvious that all the people who were employed were semi indentured servants.

Most were from southeast asia and worked 6-8 months away from their families. What broke my heart is that only a small portion could leave the ship whenever we docked and most didn't seem to have passports that allowed entry to European countries without visa so they would just wait in the dock and use up the wifi to face time their spouses and children. Except the wife was really bad and the bandwidth quickly peaked and most were left just being miserable.

It was nice being able to visit all these countries that would otherwise have cost a fortune but man the pure human suffering really broke me.

I met a cruise ship worker from Bali who started staying in the USA illegally because it pays more than the cruise ship. He works in some restaurant and will just keep doing it until he is caught or he wants to get married. Then he will return to his home country. In the mean time he is sending money back home for his family and sister's education.

If you had the power, would you fire them and be the one to give them their notice in person? If they asked why, what would you tell them? "For your own good"?

Instead of asking would you fire them for their own good, rather ask, do you employ them for their own good?

If they voluntarily show up, I think they are judging that I am offering them something better (or at least as good) as their next best option. That’s one formulation of “their own good”.

Or perhaps he would put some serious effort into seeing how their work life could be improved and would work on improving the cruise’s environmental footprint

Yes because terminating someone's employment is the exact moral equivalent of treating someone with dignity in the workplace. Their vast numbers and lengthy shifts clearly imply that their contribution to the operation of the ship is negligible.

Or could you use that power to pay them more even though you didn't have to?

Nice straw-man you present here. Or did I anywhere imply what words you try to put in my mouth?

Someone could for example give them the same working protections offered by a German contract. The same work hours. Same wages?

Someone would not have to let them go.

So you're happier that they were employed by the cruise line at all, but preferred they they be given more? I see. Giving them more than their market value is like charity. So perhaps my question should be "Would you give part of your salary to them?" Did you? It's easy to ask someone else to give charity but surely if you really mean it, you'd do it yourself first.

Though you did say "I was so abusing the lower deck people" which, given you didn't want to fire them, implies their normal life would have been even more abusive. So wasn't your company actually helping them already? Isn't that something to feel good about? You were making their lives better. Not as good as your own, but why is that the standard?

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