Several crew members working in the Housekeeping department aboard Norwegian Cruise Line ships voiced their concerns about how recent changes in stateroom services have affected their daily duties and the guest's experience as well as supervisors' expectations.
In January, NCL rolled out a new policy reducing the daily stateroom (turn-down) service provided to guests in all categories below a Suite level to one cabin cleaning per day. At the same time the company changed the previous position titles “Stateroom Steward” and “Junior Stateroom Steward” in a singular position titled “Stateroom Attendant”. With this change, the crew holding the position of Junior Stateroom Steward has seen an increase in salary, and the Stateroom Stewards' salary was scaled down.
However, it seems that not all is going well with the new policy and there are many unsatisfied guests and crew.
“The expectations are high,” says one crew member. “Before we were serving 30-35 guests per section when the ship was full, which isn't usual anymore. Now we clean staterooms for 52 guests in a section, and usually, when the supervisor inspects the cabins, he is not satisfied with our work, saying that before, we did a much better job.
What's happening? I am the one to inspect your section before, and before you were very clean... Now... Not acceptable”
Guests can't choose when their cabin will be cleaned and most often crew is stuck cleaning the rest of the cabins late, leaving some guests unhappy with the service.
“Guests are very upset because before, all rooms were done by 2 pm.”
Stateroom Attendants now work from 8 am to 6 pm which is another issue with the schedule that doesn’t not allowing Housekeeping employees to go outside in ports.
“The ship usually departs from ports in the evening and we have no time to go out since they introduced the new policy and the restructuring,” one crew member said.
Another interesting piece of information shared by the NCL crew is that there are rumors most of the major cruise lines will implement one-time cleaning service per cabin.
“They keep saying that this will be new system implemented by every company and that we can't escape from this even if we change company.”
