13 reasons Americans dislike cruises — do you love or hate them?

The Cruising Experience Has Changed — and Not for the Better

I have been on more cruises than I care to admit in polite company (in truth, it’s been about 65 total). Caribbean cruises, Alaskan cruises, Mediterranean cruises, Mexican cruises — I have watched the sun set from more lido decks than most people have had hot dinners. I used to defend cruising to anyone who’d listen. All-inclusive, I’d say. Unpack once. Wake up somewhere new every day. It’s the best deal in travel.

Then somewhere between the third “beverage package upsell” and the fourth hour waiting to get off the ship in port, something shifted. Here’s what the cruise lines have done to one of their most loyal customers — and apparently, a whole lot of others.

1. The Nickel-and-Diming Has Reached Absurd Levels

There was a time when a cruise felt genuinely all-inclusive. You paid one price and the ship took care of you. That time is gone and the cruise lines have absolutely no shame about what replaced it. Specialty dining fees, resort charges, Wi-Fi packages, gratuities that get added automatically and then increased without warning, room service delivery fees, juice bar up-charges — the cruise industry has pioneered a model of unbundled pricing that makes airline baggage fees look restrained by comparison.

2. The Ships Have Gotten So Big They’ve Stopped Being Fun

Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas carries more than 7,600 passengers. That is not a ship. That is a floating suburb. When a vessel has 40 restaurants, seven pools, an on-board neighborhood called “Central Park,” and its own zip code, something has gone wrong with the original concept of going to sea. The mega-ship arms race has produced vessels so enormous that the ocean almost feels like a backdrop rather than the point, and the experience of being one of 7,000 people shuffling toward a buffet feels less like vacation and more like a very expensive airport layover.

3. The Ports Are Completely Overwhelmed

Picture a beautiful, historic Caribbean port town. Now picture three ships the size of apartment buildings docking at once and depositing 15,000 tourists into streets designed for horse carts. That is not a hypothetical. That is Cozumel (Mexico) on a Tuesday. Some cruise destinations, like Dubrovnik (Croatia), Venice, and Nassau have all implemented or considered cruise passenger caps. This is because the volume of cruise visitors has become genuinely destructive to the places the ships are supposedly there to showcase.

4. The “Cruise Days” at Sea Feel Like a Time Share Pitch

Sea days used to be the best part of a cruise. Deck chair, good book, ocean breeze, zero agenda. Now a sea day means running a gauntlet of upsell opportunities disguised as entertainment. Art auctions. Spa “seminars” that turn into pressure sales. Casino promotions. Shore excursion hard sells at “informational” meetings. The ship has learned that a captive audience with nothing to do is a revenue opportunity, and it is not subtle about it.

5. The Food Quality Has Quietly Declined

Old-timers will tell you that cruise food used to be genuinely special. White tablecloths. Formal dining. Food that felt like an event. The main dining room experience on most major cruise lines today is closer to a large hotel banquet than a fine dining experience, and the best food on the ship has been deliberately relocated behind a specialty dining paywall. If you want the good stuff, you’re paying extra — every night, on top of the fare you already paid, on top of the gratuities you already paid, on top of the drink package you already paid.

6. The Environmental Record Is Hard to Ignore

Cruise ships are among the most polluting vehicles on earth per passenger, and the industry’s environmental record has been a slow-motion scandal for years. The EPA has documented that a single large cruise ship can generate an enormous volume of sewage, gray water, and air pollutants — and the regulatory framework governing what happens to all of that in international waters is considerably more relaxed than most passengers realize. For travelers who’ve become more conscious about their environmental footprint, that math is getting harder to square with a vacation choice.

7. Getting On and Off the Ship Is a Genuine Ordeal

Embarkation day used to have a certain excitement to it. Now it is a masterclass in crowd management that you did not sign up for. Check-in lines, security lines, boarding group queues, muster drill requirements, the inevitable person who didn’t read the luggage instructions — getting onto a modern mega-ship can eat three hours of your first vacation day before you’ve seen a single deck chair. Disembarkation in port is its own special chaos, with tender boats, shore excursion staging, and the crushing reality that 5,000 people all want to be off the ship at the same time.

8. The Drink Packages Are a Psychological Trap

The cruise line tells you that you need the drink package to avoid bill shock. The drink package costs $80 to $100 per person per day. You do the math and decide you will absolutely drink your way to value. (Spoiler: You will not drink your way to value.) Consumer travel analysts have repeatedly found that the break-even point on most cruise drink packages requires a level of daily consumption that is either impressive or concerning depending on your perspective. It’s probably obvious, but the cruise lines price them with that math very much in mind.

9. The Private Island Stops Are Not What They Sound Like

“Private island” sounds exclusive and untouched. What it usually means is a piece of land the cruise line purchased, developed into a beach club, and uses to keep passenger spending on their own property instead of in local economies. You sail past actual Caribbean islands to dock at a corporate-branded beach with branded beach chairs, branded cocktails, and a branded snorkel tour sold to you by the same company that sold you the cruise. It is a fine beach. It is not an adventure. And the locals on the actual islands your ship sailed past notice the difference.

10. The Excursions Are Wildly Overpriced

The ship-sold shore excursion to zip-line through the jungle costs $189 per person. The exact same tour booked directly through the local operator at the dock costs $65. This is not a secret. Every seasoned cruiser knows it. The cruise lines know that cruisers know it. The pitch for booking through the ship is that they’ll hold the boat if your excursion runs late. For many travelers, the peace of mind is worth something. For many others, paying three times the price for a zip-line is a hard sell no matter how much anxiety you have about missing the boat.

11. The Crowds at the Pool Are a Contact Sport

The pool deck on a sea day aboard a large ship is one of the more challenging social environments in modern leisure travel. Chairs get claimed at 6 a.m. by towels belonging to people who won’t appear until noon, a practice so widespread that cruise lines have written policies against it that are enforced approximately never. The pools themselves — often small relative to the number of passengers they’re meant to serve — can feel less like a relaxing dip and more like a warm, crowded soup that someone has added children to.

12. The Hidden Health Risks Don’t Get Enough Attention

Norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships are common enough that the CDC maintains an active cruise ship inspection program called the Vessel Sanitation Program specifically to monitor them. The combination of thousands of people sharing enclosed spaces, buffet lines, elevator buttons, and railings creates transmission conditions that are genuinely difficult to manage at scale. Most cruisers know this in the abstract. Fewer think about it concretely until day three at sea when half their dinner table is missing.

13. The Magic Is Harder to Find When the Price Keeps Going Up

Here’s the thing that stings the most for longtime cruisers: the price has gone up while the experience has gone down, and the cruise lines seem to be betting that loyalty and habit will paper over the gap. A family of four who cruised in 2005 and cruises today is paying significantly more in real dollars for a product that has been systematically stripped of the inclusions that made it feel like a great value. The all-inclusive promise that sold a generation of American families on cruising has been quietly hollowed out, one beverage package and one specialty dining surcharge at a time — and enough people have finally noticed that the industry’s own booking data is starting to reflect it.