Love Boats Rule the Waves

By Michael Demarest

Cruises offer bargain vacations with sitcom expectations

He who would go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, had best steer clear of M.S. Sunward II. Of the 750-odd passengers who pack aboard the spruce white ship in Miami each week for a voyage to the Bahamas, few will later recall ever having seen seas, let alone a lonely sea. On Sunward II and most other cruise ships operating out of U.S. ports, sea and sky are props for a floating fantasy sitcom vacation that promises to be more naughty than nautical. Aboard Sunward, which steams only 380 nautical miles in the course of four days, the cruising is done mostly by the passengers, whose pursuit of romance and adventure is as unrelenting as the wump-wump-klump of the slot machines. Even the popular drinks bear names that would turn an old salt's stomach: Virgin's Kiss, Coconut Cooler, Jamaican Dreams.

Kitsch as kitsch can, cruising is booming. While the vacation travel industry as a whole has been hard hit by inflation and recession, 27 major cruise lines operating in the U.S. have over the past two years logged a 40% increase in business.

According to Cruise Lines International Association, the lines will haul in some $2.8 billion in bookings for 1981. Their 88 ships are virtually sold out year round, and several new liners are under construction. This year 1.5 million passengers are expected to sail out of Florida, New York and California ports.

A major reason for the party ships' popularity is that the average short cruise (four days to a week), costing around $150 to $200 per person per day, is one of the few vacation bargains left. Meals, entertainment and most island sightseeing are all included in the ticket price; about the only extra expenses are for souvenirs and the cheap, duty-free drinks. Says Sam Revel, owner of a Beverly Hills travel agency: "First of all, people want to relax. They don't want to hurry around airports, worry about what kind of hotels they'll be in, pack and unpack. On a cruise, everything is set for you."

Another attraction that has helped to bring the cruise business back from near extinction: shipboard casino gambling.

Nearly all ships of foreign registry (major exception: Norway's) have installed casinos, and virtually all bristle with one-armed bandits. Americans' heightened interest in gourmet cuisine has also been exploited by several lines that serve four whopping meals a day--the usual three plus a midnight buffet. On many ships, the dining rooms and menus aspire no higher than Howard Johnsonian.

Cruising's biggest boost of all may be the Love Boat connection. In a bizarre show of life panting after artifice, passengers scramble aboard the cruise ships with expectations that their hours aboard will replicate the determinedly fatuous ABC-TV series, in which two or three romances seem to occur per nautical knot and (old tars squirm again) Hollywood pretty-kins impersonate the ship's crew. The emcees sprinkle their repartee with Love Boat jokes ("The captain can marry you on board. Every marriage is good for four days"). The Los Angeles-based Princess ships, on which Love Boat sequences are filmed twice a year, are booked months in advance of the TV outings. The tube's most remarkable impact on Neptune is reflected in the age of the passengers.

Whereas cruise-ship patrons a few years ago were traditionally retirees, more than half the passengers today are nearer 30.

The partying begins hours before the ships cast off. From Miami, after a cruise aboard Sunward II, TIME'S William Mcwhirter filed this report:

The 35-year-old skipper, Paal Korner -- the only person aboard who is not addressed by his first name-- looks as if he came to Norwegian Caribbean Lines from central casting. So do most of his tightly uniformed fellow officers. There are 84 honeymooners aboard. Perhaps half the passengers are unmarried couples ("Just good friends"), some of whom may simply be saving money by doubling to avoid single rates for a two-occupant cabin.

We may have started with a fantasy, but what we get after four days is a sensation of oblivion being pounded into us like the surf. The good, the bad and the forgettable, along with fun and non-fun, with things that work and things that flop, are all scheduled relentlessly. There are bingo parties and honeymooners' parties and singles' parties and virtually every form of organized recreation short of cross-country skiing. The Norwegian Caribbean Lines manages to sustain the illusion of nonstop reveling by helicoptering live cabaret acts between Sunward and its other ships. Some cruise vessels feature Broadway shows. The goings-on get wilder and younger in summer, when passengers board the ships on Friday in their workaday clothes and play until they totter ashore on Monday morning.

What makes the cruise a success after all is not so much fantasy as the in exhaustible enthusiasm of the crew. After several months of 18-hour days, former Schoolteacher Amy Mason, 28, a Doris Day look-alike who serves as social director, seems as buoyant as a sea nymph.

"I'm just wired this way," she gulps.

"It's not forever. It's for now. But I've found it."

One measure of such voyages' appeal is that an estimated 25% of vacationers who take cruise ships come back for more. Many, like John Pagano, 30, a bachelor from Jersey City who returned recently from his third cruise, sign up with singles groups that are specifically put together by travel agents to promote Love Boat romance. Pagano, a railroad man, has struck up an amour on each of his trips. Naturally, he will go down to the seas for another vacation. As he puts it, "You don't have to do anything but show up, and you're taken care of." Virgin's Kisses and all.

-- By Michael Demarest

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