Somewhere around your second week of cruise research, you’ll read a sentence like “We booked a guarantee on the BOGOHO fare, so now I’m just waiting on OBC and a roll call.” You’ll nod along like you understand it, but you don’t. Cruising comes with its own language, and nobody hands you a guide when you take your first step onboard.
So here’s a quick cheat sheet of the lingo you’ll hear before you book, in Facebook groups and onboard. Every term is right here in our handy little Ultimate Cruise Term Dictionary, which you can search any time, so bookmark it, you may need it at some point!
Terms You’ll Hear Before You Book
Start with double occupancy. Nearly every fare you see assumes two people are sharing the cabin, which is why solo travelers get hit with a single supplement for the crime of traveling alone. Then there’s wave season, roughly January through March, when cruise lines roll out their best promotions. It sounds like a beach event. It’s really a sale with a nautical name.
Watch out for the guarantee cabin, where you’re promised a category but the cruise line picks the actual room later. Sometimes you get a lovely surprise upgrade. Sometimes you get the cabin above the nightclub. And keep an eye out for OBC, short for onboard credit, which is money you can spend on the ship. It’s nice to have, but read the terms.
Terms You’ll Hear in Facebook Groups
Cruise groups are wonderful, helpful and occasionally usually unhinged, and the self-proclaimed “experts” usually speak using acronyms and short hand. The big one is the roll call, a thread where everyone booked on the same sailing connects ahead of time to plan meetups and swap excursion ideas. Then there’s DMV, and no, nobody’s renewing a license. It means “Don’t Miss Vessel,” the friendly reminder that the ship will absolutely leave without you.
Members also love a label. A chair hog claims a pool lounger at dawn with a towel and then vanishes for four hours. A fish extender is a fabric organizer on the cabin door, a Disney tradition used for swapping little gifts with neighbors. And the cruise hangover is that flat, sad feeling when you get home and miss the ship. It’s basically the most expensive kind of homesickness.
Terms You’ll Hear Onboard
The muster drill is the safety briefing before or shortly after you sail. It’s required, it’s quick, and your muster station is printed on your key card, so please pay attention. On port days, a tender port means the ship anchors offshore and small boats shuttle you to land, which eats into your time ashore. And treat the all aboard time as maritime law unless you want to be a pier runner.
Then there’s the crew’s own language. You’ll hear washy washy at the buffet entrance, where crew cheerfully remind everyone to sanitize their hands. Behind the scenes, I-95 is the nickname for the long service corridor running the length of the ship below the waterline. There’s plenty more where that came from, and the dictionary’s crew life section is a fun read.
That’s maybe a dozen terms, and the dictionary has nearly 300! Next time someone drops an acronym on you, look it up in the Ultimate Cruise Term Dictionary. You can search any word, filter by cruise line, or browse A to Z. You can even request we add a term that we may have missed.
