Could You Live On A Cruise Ship? 🛳️

We cruise – a lot. We’ve been halfway around the world on various ships, and have found that cruising is a preferred way for us to travel. Recently, we cruised with a couple who was living on cruise ships full time. They rented out their house, packed their bags, and were in their sixth month of cruise ship living when we learned about them. In the past year since we retired, we have, or are scheduled to spend around 120 days cruising. This fall, we will spend another 47 days on a cruise ship, but we have wondered – could we live on board indefinitely? Logistics aside, having someone cook for you, clean for you, entertain you, along with medical facilities, translators, a gym, a spa, a casino, pools, hot tubs, light shopping, *and* being able to see the world sounds mighty appealing to me!

How would the math work? As of this writing in 2023, Carnival Cruise Lines, which is known as the most budget-friendly cruise option, charges approximately $16 per guest, per day for gratuities. In our case, these would be $11,680 for a year. Plus, there are port fees and taxes, which can vary wildly, as well as the cost of the cruise itself. We estimate port fees on the high side, also at $16 per person, per day – so another $11,680 annually. The cost of the cruises can also vary, but once you have cruised for a while, it isn’t impossible to get low-cost offers of $100-$200 per cruise, for an interior room (the cheapest option), but you typically can’t count on great rates unless you spend a bit at the casino. Using $200 per cruise, with an average cruise lasting a week long, then that might add up to another $10,400, for two – or (much) more. So far, we are at a minimum of around $34,000 for the year just in costs directly associated with the cruises.

Next, you’ll have to factor in flights, trains, hotels, long-stay rentals as needed, public transportation, ride-shares, internet service, and miscellaneous items that you can’t get on the ship. In our scenario we would depend on special low-rate cruise offers that tend to be on a rolling basis that would make it difficult to fully plan a year out. So, what if the the great offers that make this affordable stop coming and dry up? What if your itinerary changes when you are in a foreign port? Could you shift and find lodging and meals on the fly for a week? Two weeks? If there was a month or two when you couldn’t get good rates for a series of cruises, would you just pay higher prices anyway, or do something else? The costs can add up quickly when plans change. Very conservatively, it could cost a minimum of $50,000 to $60,000 for a year. Is that feasible? Well, maybe, but there are other things to consider as well.

The ship’s medical unit is bare-bones. We were once on a cruise and had sailed an entire day towards Hawaii, but had to go back around twenty hours to U.S. waters to have the Coast Guard evacuate a passenger who had broken a bone and needed surgery. One time I broke a tooth and they could offer no assistance with that. Luckily, we were in a port, and Mike was able to quickly debark and find a drug store to get some supplies – and get back before we left! If you had a medical emergency outside of U.S. waters, you could end up in a medically hostile country that demands pre-payment before you will be seen. We’ve heard horror stories about families having to cough up over $10,000 for an emergency clinic visit! You might want to supplement whatever insurance you currently have with a travel policy that covers some urgent scenarios and medical evacuation. Our insurance coverage costs $750 for the year, but we’ve never had to use it, so I can’t really say if it’s a good deal or not.

Could you live without internet? We have a generous plan through T-Mobile that works wonderfully in the U.S., but it does not work on the ships – unless we are in port. Even then, we are limited to some pitifully minimal amount of data that runs out after a few days. The “extended” international plans are prohibitively expensive. Yes, you can pay the extortionate rates for internet plans offered on the ships, but it will add up quickly, and cruisers often complain about the speed and quality. I wonder if you could get a mobile Starlink or Nomad setup for an affordable price? Probably not.

You will also find repetitiveness in the food menus, stage productions, onboard activities, and itineraries. If those things matter to you, then full-time cruise ship life might not include the variety you need. You won’t be running to the grocery store, the library, WalMart, or anywhere else on a daily basis. Is that okay with you?

Do you like to watch television? Since we are talking about living full time and not being on vacation, this can be a real consideration. The cruise ships usually have around 20 pre-negotiated channels – half of them proprietary ship advertisements and programming. On Carnival ships, there are a couple of movie channels on a loop, a couple of children’s channels, a news channel, a food channel, a home channel, maybe a sports channel, and travel and history themed channels. No Netflix, no YouTube TV, no local news. I suppose you could load a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive, and keep it updated as you are in port, but if you like to binge watch, you would need to plan for that! Also, cruise ships don’t really want you to spend time in your room, so the televisions are not the biggest, or best quality. They tell you that the input ports (HDMI) are not accessible to connect to your laptop or tablet, although it MAY still be possible, with some ingenuity, so you can view on the larger screen, especially on older ships. If someone made a small, portable, big-screen television or projector, that might be a nomadic game changer! If you are used to downloading the shows and movies you watch to your laptop and watching them there, this might be a non-issue for you. But when your drive fills up and you urgently need a newer, bigger one, there will be no Amazon delivery!

Is claustrophobia a thing for you? Do you tend to get restless and fidgety? Can you handle long periods of time in a small room, or a small ship, surrounded by water? How about spending 24/7 with your significant other? Even with all of the entertainment and leisure activities on board, you would still find yourself unable to get away from crowds of people. Your room will be small, and you really won’t be able to have many personal items with you other than what will fit in a suitcase or two. You and your partner, if you have one, will pretty much do everything together. Can you live like that? Also, you’ll have no microwave, a dorm-sized fridge, no personal coffee maker, no windows (if you have an interior room), possibly no water pressure – could you do it? Could your spouse?

Lastly, there are the people on cruise ships. Cruising back to back to back for extended periods of time gives you a revolving door of interesting people onboard every week. While we tend to keep to ourselves, we have met many interesting people throughout our travels. Our experience has been that the staff are all great – it’s the guests who provide us with endless hours of astonishment, amazement, and amusement, just like any late-night at WalMart. People-watching is practically a sport on board, and your patience will be tested often. From the wheelchair/scooter miracle people who have to board the ship first due to their inability to walk, only to abandon the mobility devices to wander around the dining room, casinos, or dancing the night away in the nightclub, to the feral children and their entitled parents, to the wasteful eaters, the drunks, the cougars, the loyalty snobs and those who complain just to complain. Honestly, most cruisers are just regular people trying to have a good time on vacation, but in the last few years, the behavior, courtesy, and manners of certain individuals has gone off the charts to the negative. As I sit here in the dining room, the man at the next table is blowing his mucous-filled nose repeatedly, and loudly. If I was still eating lunch, my gag reflex would fill my plate with a secretion of my own, no doubt. If you plan to live on a cruise ship for long periods of time, you would just have to accept that people don’t share the same values, volume, manners, and/or common sense. You would have to be okay with that and let things go. The good news is that the difficult people don’t stay on board at the end of the cruise. On the flip side, I would advise that those considering the possibility of living on cruise ships decide if you can handle a variety of behaviors (like any large high school on the planet), and be honest about your temperament and tolerance level for nonsense.

Mike and I have talked about it and we think we could do it, although we might have to pair cruise ship living with land stays for at least a couple of months per year. To get the best rates, our health insurance dictates that we have annual physicals, and we have a primary clinic and dentist that we would like to continue using. Because of that, and to touch base with our family, we would need to spend a minimum of a month off the ship each year. I’m willing to give it a try!