The PROBLEM with Cruise Ships

cruise ships have had a bit of a rough time in the news over the years from the literal Titanic to pandemic disasters to the emth cruise that went viral earlier this year these floating cities are a contentious way to travel and yet their popularity is booming and I hate it this video is sponsored by ground news listen I have a lot of friends and family who like to go on cruises and I'm sticking my neck out here making a video about the problems with these giant boats and so you are not the only one if you decide to send this video to a family or a friend or someone who loves cruises you're not the only one who's who's calling it out and and if you're the person who they sent that video to just know that they they still love you they're just thinking about your well-being this is like when somebody's dating someone that you know is not good for them you know you don't want to say anything but you really should he's a good kisser he is your cousin don't hey s so with that in mind let's hop into it since the pandemic slowdown the cruise ship industry has been booming this is the fastest growing industry in tourism and if you take some time to look into everything an all-inclusive cruise actually has a lot to offer and you're going to understand why here in a minute firstly I think there's something about just the magnitude of these boats that entices people right like the biggest cruise ship has room for 10,000 people on board and it's the size of some of the tallest buildings on Earth just the experience of being on one of these things is kind of awesome already I'm even kind of interested but then when you get on board there's a whole other level you can access professional life performances Spas poolside activities and more you can easily drop off the kids at one of the six water slides on deck and then spend the rest of the day blaming the waves for your poor golf skills but probably the most important factor is how easy it is if you just look at any of the forums or blogs on the subject the consensus is simple they take all of the stress and planning issues out of travel and as simple as it might sound this is one of the main reasons for the cruise industry's success these all inclusives on the sea make travel easy for just about anyone you don't have to learn a foreign language you don't have to plan your accommodation Your Entertainment or even what you're going to eat for dinner and because of this in 2023 31 million people embarked on over 300 different cruise ships around the world Carnival Cruises alone generated $21 billion that year and according to this statista report in 2019 almost 50% of cruise ship passengers were American and in many ways the entire cruise industry is specifically an American phenomenon and you're going to see why as we go through this video I think it is the fact that these cruise ship experiences are supposed to be easy and carefree that people don't think that anything could possibly go wrong when they get on these boats take that 9month cruise that set sail in December it's gone viral because they've already had a ton of go down like a flood a wine shortage covid cases and a literal death it's being compared to the fire Festival except on water and even if you thought it couldn't get crazier recently a cruise ship sailed into New York City with a dead whale on it a story we wouldn't have even heard about if it weren't for ground news it's an app and a website dedicated to Gathering thousands of different articles all in one place to give you the full context of what's going on in the world we keep working with them because we love their platform and we think that you will too so feel free to check them out at ground. news/ futureproof now when looking through these sources you'll notice that there is a handful of Articles like this one from the Gothamist that focuses on the sheer size of this whale for some reason whereas other ones are a little less sensationalized like this nine news article that's short and to the point with ground news you can see the difference in the way that these articles frame a particular story to get your attention but you can also see their political leanings their level of factuality and more another cool feature is their blind spot feed which shows you what the left and the right are and are not focusing on here you get easy access to what the other side's reality is to get the full picture of what's going on in the world it also means that you won't miss anything if you gravitate to one end of the spectrum or the other they even show blind spots for subjects that you're actually interested in like the economy we like ground news because they're encouraging you to make informed Decisions by sharpening your critical thinking skills which is basically what we're doing here on this channel as well so we encourage you to Dive Right In by going to ground. news/ futureproof or you can scan this QR code to get started you can join for less than a dollar a month or use our Link in the description to get 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan which is what we use here on the channel thanks again to ground news for sponsoring this video let's get back into it but it's not just that these boats are convenient that has made them so popular it is also about cost these ships still maintain that appearance of affordable convenient luxury even if you Splurge for a few extras you're still very likely to get a cheaper deal than something comparable on land if you're really careful and you do a lot of planning you can get a week-long cruise food included for under $500 which I have to admit is a tempting deal people are retiring on cruise ships because it can be as affordable if not even cheaper than living on land plus you get to see more of the world now as you might suspect the cruise industry is not out here trying to solve the affordable housing crisis they're getting theirs believe me and your ticket is far from the only cost that you'll see if you decide decide to get on board but we'll get into that later first we have to get into some of the more invisible trickery at play on these boats see to understand cruise ships you have to first understand one key feature this industry is about as unregulated and as sketchy as you can get the open ocean just doesn't abide by the same rules that us land lers are used to and these companies are basically Pirates take taxes for example most American compan companies pay on average 21% on income tax alone and then they also have to charge sales tax on everything they sell not to mention property taxes Insurance the list goes on when you take your small City out into the middle of the ocean you can kind of do whatever the hell you want so many cruise ship companies fly the flag of low tax countries like Liberia where they can pay often less than 1% on taxes and as a bonus they get to hire from all sorts of countries that don't have pesky things like labor laws so not only are they saving on taxes but they can also get away with scheduling employees for 12-hour workday 7 days a week while paying them next to nothing and while this sounds like pretty standard exploitation of poor people you got to also think about the fact that if they wanted to leave they're stuck on a ship in the middle of the ocean so they're paying no tax they have the cheapest labor humanly possible and they are serving only the wealthiest pocketbooks in the world Americans and wildly this is only just the beginning see if you are a relatively heartless person you might think well I mean look there's exploitation with everything nowadays you know you can't go to the grocery store without somebody being taken advantage of and you know I deserve a vacation that I can afford I'm I'm like a I'm like from the Bronx or something I have no idea what this accent is well I hate to tell you my Bronx living brother taking a cruise is also bad for you the people on board the first thing you got to understand is that upselling is the cruise ship business that cheap ticket is a lost leader designed to be affordable enough to get as many people on board as possible so they can get them to buy more stuff once they're there apparently it has even become a bit of a game to try and get from one end of the ship to the other on an MSC Cruise without somebody trying to sell you something all of this is absolutely crucial to the cruise ship business model as you might expect these ships are pretty expensive to build and run a typical cruise ship costs over a billion dollar upfront and then up to a million dollar a day to run but all of that money is spent regardless of how many passengers are actually on the ship right so the cruises are actually incentivized to get as many people on board as possible regardless of ticket price so that they can gouge them on the extra expenses cuz the reality is cruise ships probably don't make their money off ticket sales alone just like going to the movie theater or being stuck in an airport they can get away with insane prices because you the customer don't have any other options except in this specific circumstance you're not just there for the length of a film or or a layover you are completely within the cruise ecosystem for the majority of your week-long or even maybe monthl long trip and now of course I want to just say that it is not impossible or bad for you to enjoy your time on a cruise ship I just think it's important that we recognize that there's a lot of deceptive marketing going into getting more money out of your pocket pretty much all of the extra fun things that are going to be available on board that you might want to try out are going to cost you a little bit extra and listen if you're on vacation and that's what you want to do that is absolutely fine but just know that's how they're making their money but listen at this point we're only just talking about what happens on the boat while at sea but of course one of the main features of a cruise is that you get to stop in at ports along the way but for cruise lines this is a bug not a feature it's an unfortunate reality that they have to dock import cities where you can take your dollars elsewhere except that's not even true anymore a few years back Royal Caribbean had a genius thought they said to themselves what if passengers literally had no other place to go what if we owned absolutely everything and they did it Royal Caribbean was one of the first cruise lines to turn one of their Islands into a resort and now everybody's doing it Disney is probably the most impressive in this case as they own not one but two private resorts in the Bahamas and that as of this summer you can visit both in a single 6-day cruise this all-encompassing strategy is specifically designed to keep you from thinking too hard about what you're doing where you're going why you're going there and what that might be doing to the world around you and this is a huge problem private islands were a great Money Maker for the cruise ship industry but it was also a bit of a necessity Business Insider actually suggested Cruise Lines almost require private islands these days partly because communities are so fed up with both the environmental and social disruption that these boats cause it's a widespread enough issue that we are in fact seen more locations Implement restrictions on how many cruise ships are allowed to visit Santorini capped Cruise tourists at 8,000 a day this is an island of 15,000 people so any more than that is just absolute chaos and that's a city with the population in the power to do so small Port Towns in places like Nuna get completely overwhelmed by these ships when they arrive and these towns actually in some cases have no authority to say no and I got to be honest this is a bit bit of a personal subject for me as a person who lives in a place where cruise ships dock you know when there is a cruise ship in town suddenly your streets are crowded with people and the mess that they leave in their wake is honestly depressing I know that obviously there is a bunch of good people who go on cruises who are respectful of their surroundings but when you get a massive group of people descending in on a city all at once like that without any kind of structure or control it usually doesn't mesh well with thecal local culture and sadly the problems don't stop when the tourists get back on the boat and leave either I live in Victoria British Columbia on the west coast of Canada and I'd always heard these debates about how the cruise ships were these critical things to the prosperity of our city apparently $153 Million worth of Tourism money was generated from these ships just last year but this sort of excludes all the garbage that they put on our landfill the CO2 that they pump into our air and the literal that they leave in the water when they're at our Port now the garbage thing is pretty standard every port where a cruise ship docks needs to unload trash but the sewage thing is a whole other Beast because Canada has more relaxed laws on dumping then Washington below us and Alaska above us which is where the boats typically run so along this route they'll often deliberately wait until passing us to dump everything into our ecosystem and there is is some crazy irony here about a cruise ship traveling up the coast to see the beautiful whales and then pumping dookie into their blo holes at the same time it actually gets even worse back in 2020 the international Marine organization instated a regulation to make big ships switched to cleaner more efficient fuel but that fuel is more expensive and so instead the cruise ship started using these things called scrubbers which cleans exhaust gases and this sounds awesome Until you realize that they just dump the chemicals removed from the exhaust right back into the water this functions as a loophole because they've technically removed their emissions from the air but they've just passed it down into the water instead so bearing all of this in mind I'm not entirely convinced here that the economic benefits outweigh all the other baggage another independent study showed that while Cru tourism Victoria constituted nearly 12% of the total numbers of visitors they represented less than 2% of Tourism spending in the region which I think captures my biggest problem with the cruise ship industry because travel is great but not on cruises look I love to travel I've been around the world but I would say that taking a cruise is not actually traveling in my opinion traveling is about learning new things expanding our perspectives and getting out of our comfort Zone and modern cruise culture is basically the complete opposite they're a one siiz fits all option that's meant to be generically engaging for a wide range of people from small children to retirees it's all about excess and comfort you eat as much as you can because it's free and easy you drink to your heart's content you lay about on the ship and you shut off your brain watching meaningless performances on stage it's essentially a pilgrimage in honor to the gods of consumerism and once again I have to say that if you have had a good time on a cruise that's not surprising these things are designed to be enjoyable and I think in some circumstances they make sense but for the most part you have to be aware of just how Insidious this industry really is but before you click away um if you like the idea of going somewhere by boat with a bunch of people to look at some stuff then another intriguing option that we came across is a company called uncruise which is basically exactly what it sounds like the antithesis to Modern cruises this is their mission statement which of course is just a nice thing that a company gets to say but it basically sounds like the exact opposite of what mainstream cruises are today we're talking about smaller ships that Foster a community educated crew members who want to share knowledge with you locally sourced ingredients and an emphasis on genuine Adventure without a bunch of of extra charges and honestly whether it's a cruise or a backpacking trip the main thing here is to travel intentionally you can be a dirt bag in another country and have got there hitchhiking in the back of a truck or something you just have to travel with the idea that you are there to learn and to gain an appreciation from the places that you're visiting and if you still have family members who brag about their cruises you can you can send them this video and you can burn those bridges you know all jokes aside I hope you enjoyed this video if you want to see more subscribe and we'll see you every single week [Music]

Channel: Future Proof

Views: 205,052

Keywords:

Id: 3I6KIT0NRQw

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2024