Generally speaking, if you are an extrovert, you will adjust much easier to the culture on the cruise ship. The ability to seek every opportunity to talk and create conversations is crucially important on the ship, especially when working in front of the house and dealing with guests.

In response to growing concerns about mental health on cruise ships, there have been several recent additions to the small body of research on seafarers' mental well-being, which has sought to examine the prevalence of mental health issues among seafarers, review the support that exists and offer recommendations on how to protect the mental health of seafarers.

When you are at home before your first cruise ship assignment, you don't know how many different things are going to happen when you board the ship. Everything you probably heard from those employment agencies back home is only the good side of the story. When you pack your luggage and finally set to join the cruise ship for the first time, just take a deep breath; in the end, everything will be ok. Be brave and prepare yourself for a unique, beautiful, challenging journey.

Working on a cruise ship has many visible advantages and disadvantages compared to working on land. As they always say, the grass looks greener in the neighbor's lot. I have spent nearly ten years working on a cruise ship, and I always tried to focus on the positive aspects. One of the main differences between working on the cruise ship and working on the land is that you don't need to commute to work. That is a huge advantage; you don't have to spend 1 hour traveling to get to work.

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, which resulted in the confinement of a large part of the world’s population, a string of consequences not seen since the Second World War shook the social and economic structures of most, if not all, countries, prolonged confinements, limited mobility, and border closures affected all economic sectors to varying extents, however, hospitality and tourism were possibly the hardest hit of all despite their years of steady growth.

Work on a cruise ship is hard to generalize by someone's subjective experience. Someone back home might ask you- how is it to work on the cruise ship? Some friends may need advice on which cruise line is the best to apply for. Is it better to work on ocean cruise ships or river ship?

There was a time when I was a crew bartender on a cruise ship sailing out from Florida. It's nice to be a crew bartender, most bartenders would disagree with that, but I really enjoyed it. It was hard because I had no one else to help me set up or close the bar; I was opening and closing it and serving the crew members. Some bartenders did not like to work there because they wanted to go to the crew bar to drink when they were off duty.

I remember the time when I started working on cruise ship and saw couples fighting between themselves. What instantly came to my mind was," How are they going to have a healthy relationship on the land if they can't have a healthy relationship on the cruise ship"?

Sometimes, you get fortunate during your contract. Depending on the ship's management, sometimes the HR coordinator is innovative enough to create some awesome crew activities that will certainly boost the happiness of the crew members. While I was working on the ship in Australia, I met my two best friends and colleagues from the bar department.

We often struggled to maintain our physical and mental health during long contracts on the cruise ship. Physical health could be maintained much easier than our mental health. Indeed, both are extremely important for keeping our sanity and healthy state of mind. Our physical and mental health mainly depends on hours of sleep, the amount of stress we are exposed to, how often we exercise, and our preferred diet.