You just spent seven days island hopping around the Caribbean, downing several of the “drink of the day” while baking in the warm sun, and seeing how you look in that new Senor Frogs t-shirt you bought while in Cozumel.
As you head back to your stateroom, an ominous sign that your vacation is about to be over awaits you on your bed.
The dreaded disembarkation letter complete with luggage tags.
For a moment you remember the excitement you felt when you printed out luggage tags at home and began your cruise countdown, these luggage tags, however, don’t bring that same level of emotion.
The sad part is, your vacation is over. You have just a few hours left to enjoy the amenities of the cruise ship you called home for the past week. There’s just enough time to stop by the duty-free to buy some of those rum cakes and tax-free cigarettes. You want to hit the casino one more time before you head to bed in the hopes you’ll strike it rich so you can stay on board forever.
But you still need to pack because starting at 6:30am the next morning, you need to get off!
We’ve all experienced it and it truly is the worst part of the cruise vacation experience. But imagine, for just a brief moment, being on the other side…. As a crew member.
The men and women who have taken care of your every whim, now have to undertake a physically draining “day-in-the-life” called turnaround day. The one day a week when they have to disembark several thousand passengers (and their luggage) and embark an equal number (and their luggage) in as little as ten to 12 hours.
Their day is just beginning when you’re heading off to sleep. The luggage you put outside your stateroom door before retiring is collected and taken down into the bowels of the ship where it will be unloaded when the ship reaches port.
Like a finely tuned machine, crew members make quick work of the luggage deck-by-deck, then get a quick nap in before the mayhem begins.
On Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas, one of the largest cruise ships in the world, turnaround day begins as the ship reaches port around 6:30am. It’s then when luggage begins to make its way off the ship and into the port’s huge holding areas where dogs give them a sniff before suitcases are placed in color coded areas for (somewhat) easy locating.
Around 7am the first group of the ship’s nearly 7,000 guests starts leaving the ship. This is a carefully choreographed process designed not to overload customs officials in the terminal and to time the arrival of luggage with the proper group of passengers.
By 10am the passengers have left the ship and in just one hour, new passengers will begin arriving.
Between 10am and 1pm, 2,742 staterooms are cleaned and prepped for the next round of happy vacationers ready to being their Caribbean cruise.
Before “all aboard” at 4pm, the crew is busy checking in guests, loading 12,000 pieces of luggage and all the supplies needed to keep the passengers and crew happy and fed including:
- 5,400 lobster tails
- 21,000 ice cream cones
- 8,800 pounds of tomatoes
- 9,000 pounds of lettuce
- 14,800 pounds of potatoes
- 2,600 pounds of apples,
- 5,400 pounds of bananas (In three stages from green to ripe so a guest always has a fresh one!)
- 46,800 eggs
- 2,622 gallons of milk
- 19,723 pounds of chicken
- 18,314 pounds of beef
- 7,070 pounds of fish
- 10,680 hot dogs (Why? Nobody really knows!)
- 31,900 bottles of beer
- 900 cans of beer (There’s one in every crowd!)
- 16,900 cans of soda
- 820 bottles of vodka (980 when I’m on board!)
- 179 bottles of whiskey
- 293 bottles of scotch
- 765 bottles of rum (Think “Drink of the Day!”)
- 3,360 bottles of white wine
- 2,776 bottles of red wine
- 7,397 pounds of cheese
- 330 case of pineapples
- 1,899 pounds of coffee
Not to mention:
- 10,272 rolls of toilet paper (See the list above for why.)
- 1,000 light bulbs (Who would have thought?)
- 30 replacement televisions (Hmmmm….)
And to avoid the dreaded norovirus… 23 gallons of hand sanitizer
It’s pretty amazing that all this takes place in such a short amount of time, isn’t it? Check out this video from Royal Caribbean that shows what it’s like on turnaround day on one of their massive Oasis-class cruise ships, Oasis of the Seas.