New World of Cruising Has Appeal to All Types

With so many huge new cruise ships coming on line--August saw the debut of Princess Cruises’ ninth ship, the 1,590-passenger Regal Princess, and November will bring Royal Caribbean’s 2,354-passenger Monarch of the Seas--cruise lines are taking 1990s lifestyles into consideration and courting every potential new passenger. Attention is being paid to nonsmokers, environmentalists, dieters, exercisers, budgeters, newlyweds, singles, seniors and families.

So the answer to the frequently asked question, “Where are the passengers coming from to fill the new ships?” would seem to be, “From everywhere, so long as they get what they want.”

Cruises have long since ceased being the exclusive domain of the sedate, well-to-do elderly. Today, most ships set sail with a mix of yuppies and golden girls, honeymooners and singles, church choirs and automotive parts salesmen, retirees and recyclers, teen-agers and toddlers.

On June 23, the most passengers ever to take a single voyage on a modern-day cruise ship--2,613 passengers--boarded Carnival’s new Ecstasy on its third scheduled sailing, according to a line spokesman. Not coincidentally, the ship includes a children’s playroom, teen disco and separate children’s pool and deck area.

“The cruise industry used to say that cruising was for adults,” recalls Bjornar Hermansen, chief operating officer of Premier Cruises. “While never saying, ‘We don’t want your children to come along,’ they would infer that children should stay with grandma so the parents could have a nice vacation. But we thought we could create a cruise for the whole family.”

So in 1982, Hermansen and his then-partner Bruce Nierenberg created a cruise for kids and their parents that combined half a week at sea with a half-week stay at Disney World. Today, as many as 5,400 people a week, including 1,000 or more children at any given time, board one of Hermansen’s three ships to get an introduction to cruising. Premier’s exclusive contract with Walt Disney World allows it to have costumed Disney characters on board.

The company hopes to have a Southern California Disneyland connection by next summer, with a ship based in Los Angeles to offer similar programs.

But a changing attitude toward children on board is only one of the new wrinkles in cruising.

Honeymooners in record numbers are booking cruises at all price levels, even in some cases conducting the ceremony and reception on board the ship before sailing.

Business groups are holding more and more meetings and seminars on cruise ships, where, among other considerations, it’s harder for the participants to slip away.

A clean environment is vitally important to many new passengers. Salen Lindblad’s new Frontier Spirit, singled out for awards for its non-polluting features, will have a full season in the Antarctic this winter. Among other restrictions, passengers and crew are fined $50 on the spot by Capt. Heinz Aye if they throw any refuse, including cigarettes, overboard. Fines are donated to the Oceanites Foundation, a nonprofit oceans awareness group.

Nonsmokers are getting more attention as well, with more than token nonsmoking dinner tables. Carnival Cruise Line executives say they are designating two-thirds of the public areas on the new Ecstasy as nonsmoking, based on research that shows less than 25% of their passengers are smokers. New Majesty Cruises, an upscale subsidiary of Dolphin Cruise Line, will declare smoking off-limits in its Royal Majesty restaurant when the ship debuts late next summer; 132 of the 528 passenger cabins also will be designated smoke-free.

As cruise ships get bigger and bigger, service becomes a main selling point for small luxury vessels such as Seven Seas Cruises’ Song of Flower, which claims the highest ratio of staff to passengers in the cruise industry: four crew members to every five passengers.

The changing cruise market also reflects changing attitudes about tipping. Many first-time and young passengers, insecure about tipping procedures, prefer tips to be included upfront as many of the small luxury lines are doing, or to be optional, as aboard Holland America’s four ships. For lines that still require tipping, they would like to see precise figures printed in the brochure, as Celebrity Cruises has done.

Price discounts, many industry-watchers feel, will become a fact of life on three-, four- and seven-day sailings. Discounting grew rapidly during and just after the Persian Gulf crisis, and stayed around as recession-wary Americans weighed leisure-travel expenditures.

So it behooves budget-minded cruisers to find a qualified travel agent who keeps up on the latest money-saving deals. While many of the heavily discounted cruises advertised in newspaper ads and flyers belong to legitimate discount agencies, there are some scam artists who pocket payments and then disappear without remitting the money to the cruise line.

It’s a wise practice not to send any money to an unfamiliar company before checking them out with professional travel agent organizations such as ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) and ARTA (Assn. of Retail Travel Agents), the Better Business Bureau, and cruise organizations such as CLIA (Cruise Lines International Assn.) and NACOA (National Assn. of Cruise Only Agencies).