All at sea: Insights into crew work experiences on a cruise liner

Abstract

This research explores employee experiences of working on board a cruise ship. Cruise liners have been described as floating hotels; but increasingly they are more like floating resorts, embracing passenger and crew populations as big as small towns. In addition to the usual service sector experiences and emotional labour requirements of service jobs in the hospitality sector, the shipboard context in which employees live and work put considerably further constraints and pressure on crew. This paper reports on these crew experiences, informed by both participant observation and semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of frontline hotel services staff. For most crew, the relative value of earnings on the cruise helped compensate for being away from home in challenging working and living conditions and work relationships involving colleagues from diverse national and linguistic backgrounds.