Three Year Cruise for Remote Workers Canceled | Hacker News Reader

Three Year Cruise for Remote Workers Canceled

cnn.com

39 pointsjbverschoor59 comments

I had a real hard time parsing this when I thought it was about the company Cruise.

On topic edit:

"Life at Sea Cruises had been planning to buy the AIDAaura, a ship retired this summer by AIDA Cruises, a German subsidiary of Carnival Corp. It was due to be rechristened as the MV Lara. The company had originally slated the sale to go through by the end of September, before working on the ship in dry dock in Germany, then renovating it before sailing to Istanbul to start the cruise." They thought they could remodel a ship in 2 months?? These people must be former software engineers.

Lets be fair here. Former software architects at least!

Former project managers, probably

A refit period for a ship can be something as extensive as a full “remodel” of the interior or something as simple as regular maintenance like painting and a drydock for below the waterline maintenance.

Given the timeline, I would expect mostly routine maintenance, and maybe some minor renovations to areas like the casino that won’t be used on a residential cruise.

Yard periods are normally much better managed than software since they are massively expensive as well as a stop on revenue.

As of 2023, the real linchpin for many remote workers thinking of working from a cruise is internet speed and reliability.

I’ve worked from locations with patchy internet but enough to push a commit every few hours. But as soon as you need to reliably attend video meetings is where cruise ships fail at the present time.

Other than that, the ability to work consistently while at sea but take a few hours to explore a new city when the ship pulls into port without needing to pack bags and check in and out of a new room is incredibly appealing

> But as soon as you need to reliably attend video meetings is where cruise ships fail at the present time.

Could Starlink solve this?

Yes when/if they get their laser sat-to-sat comm links working.

They have it working, you can get coverage from anywhere on the sea, including Antarctica.

It's not cheap, at least compared to how much people think internet provision costs in a typical western suburb

Starlink works incredibly well for my friends aboard their yachts. I think this is truly and amazingly a solved problem, as incredible as it looks to write this today.

But isn't starlink still restricted to within a few dozen miles from shore where a ground station exists?

You can turn on a toggle and it works offshore, for extra money. You can also pay for the full mobile thing. There's a bunch of tiers now, the most expensive ones allow coverage offshore.

Space lasers have fixed this. There's starlink in Antarctica

For sure, was under the impression Starlink marine service was only available currently in coastal waters (within x miles of land) but not yet for full ocean access. Not sure and cannot find the specifics, the website mentions "inland" on their pricing for both enterprise maritime and leisure

Starlink satellites incorporate laser intersatellite links which make mid-ocean access possible. They've tested these links and I was under the impression they were now offering the service, but maybe not yet?

Royal Caribbean has got Starlink in the middle of the ocean, it works brilliantly.

I'd imagine Starlink on a private yacht would work "brilliantly," but on a large ship with thousands of passengers, you're more likely to suffer from problems. In my experience, I've tried Starlink on a RCL ship equipped with it and I couldn't even go on Google on their "Stream" internet package. I assume this is not the fault of the underlying technology though, just a large company oversubscribing the capabilities of the uplink.

What would stop you from bringing your own Starlink dish? Unless the ship travels too fast and you need to upgrade your service level for in-movement service, it would work.

Aside from the cost of between $250 and $1,000 a month, and the practicality issues of mounting a $2,500 dish on a cruise ship?

It's not 2500$ for the normal dish, and you just set it up on the patio on its legs. 250$/m for fast internet at sea is a freaking modern miracle as far as I'm concerned.

From looking at their website, it would seem you need the $2,500 dish for maritime “on the move” usage.

In addition it would need power, and cruise ships are notorious for policing what you can plug in, and finally only a scant few rooms have balconies- and they’re the $100k a person rooms.

It all comes down to practicalities.

You don't need the maritime dish, the 500$ one does it. The power consumption is <100W continuous, I would be surprised if cruise ships can't deal with that. I'll admit idk anything about rooms with patios vs not. It just really doesn't strike me as an impossible project, not even particularly hard for someone who's willing to pay for the room.

Local WiFi might have been more of an issue

I used Starlink on a Royal Caribbean cruise last December. It worked great at sea.

It's so solved that every time my Starlink-using colleague tries to meet with anyone, nobody can hear what he's saying, and he doesn't get half of his alerts from pagerduty.

Depends where they are I guess. At sea there's not much network contention so performance is good in my experience.

Surprising since there's so many using it for zoom

> Others say they have nowhere to return to, having sold or rented out their homes in anticipation of the round-the-world voyage, as well as jettisoning their possessions.

Sounds like they're ready for vanlife. Park it down by the river, pretend you're on the cruise!

Do they even need to go on this particular cruise? What makes the experience of travelling with other digital nomads more appealing?

There aren’t many (any?) cruises that offer the price that this specific venture was aiming for. That’s without considering that very few cruises go for more than a week or two before you have to get off and back on.

Long term friendships, zero logistical hassles for the entire three years while exploring the whole world, cheap price.

This cruise is (would have been) totally unlike anything else offered.

If I were in a younger stage of my life, it could have been a kind of ideal experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv2VIEY9-A8

Previous stories:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35025337

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35053505

Turns out they weren't able to buy a cruise ship.

sucks to have to rely on other people

everything here seems on the up and up, just ambitious and from people without the network to support it unilaterally

I think alot of people, including this community, have sold a dream of entrepreneurship that doesnt really apply to the have nots, using the faces of people that only pretended to be have nots. And that leads to outcomes like this, where entrepreneurs are entirely dependent on investors they have zero clout with that are more flaky and noncommittal than when the entrepreneur has a ton of their own capital already in.

> everything here seems on the up and up, just ambitious and from people without the network to support it unilaterally

Nothing about a brand-new cruise ship company that hasn't actually done a single cruise, doesn't actually have a ship, choosing to embark on a three-year voyage, on a rush-job retrofit vessel is 'on the up and up'.

(While charging less than half of what their competitors would.)

There are so many ways it can turn into a horror show.

There's probably damn good reasons the investors flaked out.

>There's probably damn good reasons the investors flaked out.

The article mentions the ship they were previously going to use was decided to be "too small" but was also derided as allegedly unseaworthy. I'm sure the investors know more red flags than we do.

That's crazy they were able to raise money and would accept payments without having the cruise ship purchase locked down.

Like I can understand if there turned it to be unforeseen mechanical problems and necessary repairs hadn't been budgeted for.

What I can't understand is how the company selling the ship turned around and decided to sell it to someone else for more money.

EDIT: I read the article again more closely. Seems like it was actually their investment money that fell through, so they couldn't afford the ship. So the ship got sold elsewhere. Which, yikes -- you really want to guarantee you've raised that money first, before you start taking people's payments.

No matter where the problem occurred, it seems horribly incompetent.

They postponed + changed the departure city twice.

New CEO said they'd still go and that they'd bought a ship

The CEO quit.

CEO told people they'll cancel

New CEO said sorry for "the inconvenience"

COO made sure people understood what he meant.

Blames the middle east (could've just blamed COVID for that matter).

Now there are two spinoffs. One by CEO, one by another employee.

Those ships are massive polluters by the way

Compared to energy/fuel waste from living on land? I would think the required minimalism placed upon the 'tenants' would make up for the ship's pollution. Amazon doesn't deliver to the middle of the ocean (of course there's ports though...).

> Compared to energy/fuel waste from living on land?

Yes, assuming the cruise ship moves and needs many, many other boats to bring supplies like food and potable water.

They dock to resupply. What other boats are you talking about?

They dock to resupply in ports where they are able. In others they use tenders to bring supplies, and people, to and from the ships.

Many smaller ports don’t have the ability to serve larger ships, or the quantity of ships that come in during high season so some ships will anchor off and run tenders as shuttles all day.

A lot of them run smelly diesel generators that stink up cities they port in (ironically Seattle just a couple of blocks from Amazon). And I mean, it’s like a dead fish smell. They also run on very dirty fuel for propulsion.

Ya, they run on the sludge that is left over after we refine the fuel that the rest of us use in our cars.

Even if a ship had electric motors they're likely to be powered by a diesel generator. In the context of Seattle an example could be state ferries [1]

[1] https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/major-projects/fe...

edit: electric motor not engine

Many of the cruise ships actually are electric hybrid in a setup similar to a locomotive. They will have a few thruster pods that rotate that allow them to dock without tugs, as well as providing forward propulsion

AFAIK all the "massive polluters" claims I've seen involve their atmospheric pollution (eg. PM2.5, NOx, SOx) levels, not co2 levels. Compared to an apartment and a car with emissions controls, a cruise ship is obviously going to generate much more of those type of pollution. However, if you're out at sea with little people around to breathe in the pollution it's not that big of a deal.

What about the people on the ship? Is it anything like sitting next to a fireplace?

Not an air pollution expert, but my guess is that the combination of tall smoke stacks, wind currents, and the fact that the ship is moving means that passengers are breathing in little, if any of the pollution. It's in the cruise company's interest to make their ships not smell like a clogged interstate at rush hour.

Pollution is a global issue, wind and curent are not clearing it up magically

Dilution and time will.

if we stopped re-injecting pollution with overconsumption (and these cruises are part of it, like airplanes, cars), yes you're right time would solve things. I started at personal level to do this at least

probably not. a typical 3br house directly comsumes less than 40 kwh per month. to put that in perspective, that's about the amount of energy contained in a single gallon of gas.

large ships are the most efficient way to move bulk goods, but when carrying a bunch of people in their own little apartments, the per pax fuel efficiency is somewhere between a typical car and a passenger plane.

I would be very surprised if the constraints of living on a cruise ship are anywhere near enough to offset the fact that they spend most of their time moving tons of people around to places they don't need to go.

if you want to save the environment, take public transit to work and vacation in places that are connected by rail.

I live on land with a bicycle, no fridge, no heating, no AC, local food, and a yearly carbon footprint of one airplane ticket, so there's not one way to live on land, you can have great remote experience with a low footprint

A lot of the intended passengers were retirees, not remote workers.

It was marketed everywhere as a cruise for digital nomads (+ tax savings!)

> …now face a wait of at least several months to get their money back. The company has said it will make repayments in monthly installments, starting from mid-December and completing repayments in late February.

lol lawsuit incoming, unless they company is in international waters and unable to be sued in any jurisdication

You can't draw blood from a stone. What are you going to do with a judgement against a company that has no assets aside from whatever money it raised from customers?

I mean, over three months is annoying but it's faster than any process a court would follow.

And presumably the delay is related to getting their down payment on the ship back? Or other down payments made to various contractors?

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