Boom in Sunshine Cruises

Games, meals, movies--and a few bugs

Tall drinks, potted palms, dance floors full of would-be Fred Astaires and Ginger Rogerses beginning the beguine --such were the romantic hallmarks of overseas travel in the days when people traveled over the seas in ships. By 1960, though, more people were crossing the Atlantic by air than by water, and the big luxury liners had begun a long slide into nostalgic memory; hardly any are left on the Atlantic run. Yet down in the Caribbean, the glamour of the swaying grand saloon lived on: cruise ships, populated primarily by the gray and affluent set, visited the islands in style. And today the cruise business is flourishing as never before, the lure of low-priced charter flights to everywhere notwithstanding. Bookings in North America, which account for more than 80% of the world's cruise trade, totaled $1.6 billion in 1977, double the volume of a decade before. The number of passengers has passed the million-a-year mark, and the median age is dropping.

Nowadays there are specialty cruises tailored for backgammon fiends or chamber-music fanciers or homosexuals. Most people who go down to the sea for their vacations simply want good fun at a good price--and find that many cruises almost live up to the travel ads. Cruise prices run somewhere between $85 and $100 a day, with almost no extras except tips and liquor, which can be purchased for 950 or so per drink. Savvy travelers choose their cruises wisely, considering the ship's size (big ones roll less but sometimes have many decks and too few elevators), the location of one's cabin (the smoothest ride is at midship), even the nationality of the chef. Ports of call are important only insofar as they proffer duty-free goodies; the real R. and R. is aboard ship, where a vacationer can be utterly free of quotidian pressures.

Says Albert Walker, hotel manager of the Norwegian-owned Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's Sun Viking: "The aim is to inundate people with pleasure and keep it coming all the time." On New Year's Eve, the Sun Viking departed Miami for a two-week cruise, carrying 792 revelers, a crew of 318 and TIME Correspondent Richard Woodbury. Reported Woodbury from Puerto Rico, three days and 21 meals later: "Desire lurks at every turn. The important questions of life as one peruses each day's activity sheet are reduced to which luncheon to sample, which deck tourney to enter, whether to pass up the ice-carving demonstration by the Korean chef at poolside for the latest movie."

In Miami, where most U.S.-based cruises originate, the lines claim that many ships operate at better than 90% of capacity and often require bookings months in advance. One-week trips are the most popular, but budget-conscious vacationers can get away on a Miami-Bahamas run for as few as three days. Worldwide, there are somewhere around 75 cruise ships in service. Since a first-class liner costs at least $75 million to build from scratch, fleet owners customarily renovate aged vessels, packing them with tiny staterooms. The General W.P. Richardson, originally intended to carry troops, is now in its sixth incarnation as Eastern Steamship Lines' Emerald Seas.

We're showing profits like they're going out of style," says Morton Erstling, senior vice president of Eastern. Other fleet operators freely trumpet similar claims, but since most lines are foreign (Italian, Norwegian, Greek, even Soviet), privately owned and keep tightly guarded books, hard profit figures are impossible to nail down. Some lines, in fact, enjoy subsidies and tax breaks from their governments. Shipowners can cut costs by reducing crews and paring down provisions when the passenger load is light. But on some runs, 93% of the berths must be occupied for the shipowner to break even, and a half-empty vessel can spell disaster.

Then there are vagaries to which the cruise business is subject. Tropical storms can be almost as devastating as the sudden breakdown of a ship. Many Caribbean islands are politically combustible beneath their Edenic exteriors. And the industry is periodically plagued by bad publicity every time a shipload of vacationers returns home doubled over with diarrhea. In a one-year period that ended last Thanksgiving, 73 cruise ships underwent a total of 625 U.S. Government sanitation-standards inspection tests --and failed the tests two-thirds of the time. Unfortunately there are no laws on the books that would allow Washington either to order the ships cleaned up or stop them from sailing. If the salad days of the cruise business are to continue, the operators must voluntarily get the bugs out--so to speak.

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