Featured Image Credit: Insta / cruisingascrew
Topics: Cruise Ship, YouTube, Travel
Anish Vij
A woman who has worked on cruises for almost 10 years has revealed the one infuriating thing passengers always seem to do.
Originally from Birmingham, Lucy Southerton started out as a massage therapist on cruise ships when she was just 19.
Over the past five years though, she's provided some real insight into what goes on over international waters on her YouTube channel Cruising As Crew.
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In a recent upload, she explained how annoying it can be for crew members when passengers 'remove the gratuities' from the bill.
"Now a lot of people think that gratuities are additional to a crew member’s wage, as in the crew member gets a nice wage and the gratuities are something extra. But unfortunately, they’re not, the gratuities makeup the crew member’s basic wage," Lucy said.
"The reason that cruise lines get you to add gratuities on at the end to makeup the crew member’s wage is so that they can advertise cruises for less. You pay less for the cruise, which means you are more likely to come on and cruise.
"If the cruise lines upped the crew members’ wages to what they should be, cruising would be a lot more expensive.
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"So it is really not okay to remove gratuities, like a really s**t move if you do that because this person has worked really hard for you all week, if they’re your housekeeper especially and you’re basically slapping them in the face if you remove gratuities."
Previously, Lucy also opened up about what it was like to date colleagues on board and how weird it can get.
"So, I think it's kind of well known that a lot of stuff goes on, on cruise ships," she said.
"And it's all kind of 'incestuous' in a weird way because when you live in a small town, there's only a certain amount of people.
"So you know, friends end up hooking up with friends, who then end up going with the other friend, and that's like cruise ships.
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"Ultimately, there is only a certain number of people to choose from, so things are going to cross over at certain points."
However, Lucy insisted that having sex on board is actually really 'safe'.
"So my friend was really worried about catching something like an STI or an STF because he was like, 'are they just rife?'", she continued.
"Well firstly, when you have your medical done to work on a cruise ship, I would say 80 percent of medicals test you for sexually transmitted infections and diseases.
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"So actually, in that sense, it's quite safe because the majority of people who work on a cruise ship have been tested for something."