NCL throws some curves

Doug Newman posts about NCL’s new F3 ships. Now, it’s true I have a hard time getting excited about a ship which has, for the moment, a designation that resonates more of military jets than cruise ships. But it’s also true that I have a hard time getting excited about anything that NCL does. Call me jaded, or whatever. I do remember a cruise line called Norwegian. I remember them sailing one of the great liners of the past under the name of NORWAY, and not everything they did to that ship was bad–but it was they who presided over the long lingering demise of that ship, which ended finally with crew deaths and now Alang (scroll down). I also remember them benefiting from multiple shenanigans in Congress: a ship built, for all intents and purposes in Germany, but legally stamped Made in America; buying the SS United States under the pretense of restoring her to service, and letting her sit unused for the sole purpose of making sure no one else could buy her and make her into a competitor on the Hawaii circuit; a determined attempt to maintain themselves as a monopoly in the Hawaiian cruise market, and, when profit did not meet expectation, cutting back and blaming those nasty other cruise lines who had the gall to actually compete with them. (You can read the whine here, under the heading Cabotage Issues.)(And following that up with an attempt to get Congress to pass a law that would cripple the cruise industry in the US.) So I look at the F3, and see: curved walls in cabins? keeping the sink apart from the shower? No doubt these would be welcome in a new fine hotel, but great advances in cruise ship history they are not. (Well, perhaps the sink/shower arrangement might be an advance, given the number of ships in which one can take a shower while doing one’s business on the toilet.)They are still another attempt to make cruise ships as much like hotels as possible. It is, after all, NCL who has designates its best cabins by that undoubtedly terrestial term, “villa”.

Of course, attempting to improve amenities and imitate a grand hotel is not new in the passenger ship business; the trend, if one can call it that, was present even in the first steamships that crossed the Atlantic, and no doubt 18th century passengers recieved subtle hints from the ship’s purser that his ship, unlike the competition, had cabins further away from the bilges and with easy access to the deck in good weather. But it is only in the last two or three decades, as modern cruise ship design has established itself as a distinct category of maritime architecture, the tendency has accelerated, until it seems a crime for a cruise ship to actually feel like a ship.

But what we have now are big hotels that float; and those interested can follow the links in Doug’s post, and read Mr. Knego’s account of the keellaying. For my own part, the most interesting thing described by Mr. Knego is a museum.

Tags: cruise lines, cruise ships, museums, NCL, passenger ships