While it’s great to write these tips in this blog and give people new ideas, techniques and inside information they can use to get cruise ship jobs. It’s also good to take a step back occasionally and look at the cruise industry as a whole, to see exactly where it’s going.
Some of you will be considering a job on a cruise ship as a genuine long-term career option, while other’s see working on a cruise ship as a one-off life experience; where you get to see a bit of the world, have fun and get paid for it – safely and in style!
Either way, it’s important to know exactly where the cruise line industry is headed so that you can make your plans accordingly. A brand new study published by Seatrade has just revealed two findings that will have profound implications for you the cruise job seeker:
1. Cruise line companies are now placing a huge emphasis on visiting new destinations, namely Europe, Asia and countries in the Pacific Ocean.
2. By 2010 there will be an estimated 20 million cruise passengers (in 2007 there were 16 million passengers)
What does this mean for crew members and job seekers?
It means that not only will there be a much greater demand for new crew members, but it means that you’ll also have the opportunity to visit a MUCH wider range of exciting destinations. When I worked on cruise ships, just a few years ago, the opportunities for getting on a ship that visited the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji etc were nowhere near as good as they are today. Believe it or not, cruising around the Caribbean 7 days a week, as glamorous as it sounds, begins to get a little boring after 3 contracts!
But now the opportunities for traveling to some seriously exciting places via cruise ship are better than they’ve ever been.
One of our WorkOnCruiseShips.com members was hired this week to work on the Statendam (Holland America Line) within the onboard gift shops. He joins his ship on April 30th and he will start his cruise ship career sailing from Hong Kong to Alaska. You can read his message in our discussion forum here.
These are exciting times for crew members, so if you want a job that pays you to travel to some of the most exotic destinations on earth, then as the latest research shows, there has never been a better time to get a job on a cruise ship than right now.