Beautifully Spoiled – Part Two

In the world of cruise ships, they are a small organization: three ocean vessels, the largest carrying a maximum of 980 passengers and a crew of 655; five riverboats that sail in Europe with a passenger maximum of 160 and 85 crew. The interior of each ship is beautifully conceived and well taken care of. The staff is highly trained and extremely competent; but better than that they are personable, friendly and over-the-top helpful. Put all of that together and you have the recipe for a delightful environment and a protective bubble in which to travel the world. And we have done just that, beginning with our very first cruise ever in 2006. Each time we climb on board it’s like arriving at a highly anticipated reunion of valued friends, with only some of them being fellow guests.

Originally, Crystal was owned by NYK, a Japanese company who specialized mainly in cargo ships. Visit any large port and you will see their ships there. In 2015, NYK sold Crystal to Genting Hong Kong for $550 million; a branch of the same company owns Resort World, including the brand-new complex in Las Vegas, which just opened after an expenditure of $4.3 billion – it’s the largest property ever built in Vegas. So, we’re talking high finance here …

Back to the beginning of what would have been a 135-day cruise for us –

On the afternoon of the 19th of January, when we’d been on the ship for approximately 48 hours, as we were sitting at a table in the pool area just beginning to work, Steve received an email from a friend (actually the friend who started us sailing on Crystal) saying that there were some rumblings coming through that not everything was as it should be. And, within a couple of hours, we were informed that our planned cruise had been canceled and all passengers would be disembarking in Aruba, which was the scheduled port for the end of the first leg of the voyage. It seems that the ship-owning division of Genting Hong Kong had declared bankruptcy.

Remember, I talked about that pit in the previous post? Well, there it was, yawning open right in front of me, waiting for me to slide in. And I came very close to taking the plunge! My heartbeat sped up, my stomach clenched and a million thoughts simultaneously fought for my attention. Steve, being who he is, immediately began doing dual research projects: where we should go from Aruba and how to get there, combined with the down-and-dirty on what was going on behind the scenes at Genting/Crystal. I meanwhile teetered on the edge, fighting off the blend of anger and imminent tears. (Those fell when we entered our stateroom a little while later.)

I wish I could tell you that I settled down fairly quickly, and kept myself in check. Well … I could tell you that, but it wouldn’t be the truth. I spent at least a couple of days segueing between anger, grief, tears and looking on the positive side of things.

The anger was initially because I was having something I really wanted and had waited for ripped away from me. (I know – the spoiled rotten part of me – just being honest here.) The grief stemmed from my disappointment; the tears were simply a byproduct of the first two things. On the upside, it didn’t take me too terribly long to focus on the people who were really going to be hurt by this situation: the officers and crew. These kids (we call them kids; they’re all adults but most of them are a good bit younger than we are) had been bundled off the ship in March of 2020 when Covid decimated the cruising industry; they’d waited anxiously for sixteen months, many of them unable to find other jobs, some of them working two jobs and still being unable to pay their bills, until July of ’21 when Crystal put out the call and 95% of them answered. They came on board to a ship that had only had a skeleton crew for all those months, and they all pitched in to bring it back to its prior beauty, doing hard manual labor at tasks they’d never done before, while they waited to be able to welcome guests aboard once more. And, now suddenly their world was turned upside down again, through no fault of their own. Can I tell you that the vast majority of them never missed a beat? They continued their work with the same zeal we’d always seen, a smile on their faces and ready to laugh and joke with the guests. Watching them made me even more sensitive to that little whisper of “spoiled rotten?” I faintly heard shortly after my admittedly brief temper tantrum.

Over the next few days we discovered, along with the rest of the world, how brazen and corrupt Genting’s handling of the situation had been. First of all, the records show that there’s a fuel company that has been waiting since 2017 for them to pay off a multimillion-dollar invoice. Plus, it soon became clear that Crystal and their employees were not the only victims: the shipbuilding company Genting acquired in Germany has also shut down and gone into bankruptcy, as have their other cruise ships that were operating in Asia.

So, where are we now? As I write this, it’s Thursday, January 27th, and we are sailing toward Aruba where we will dock Saturday morning, and disembark the following day. Steve and I have actually not left the ship since we boarded in Miami; although we had originally signed up for a couple of tours, once the news of the changes hit, we canceled all our tours, choosing instead to stay on board and spend as much time as possible doing the two things that mean the most to us: working (for me that means writing) and spending time with the crew.

And, how am I emotionally? I’ll be honest: it will be very sad for me to leave the ship, not knowing what the future will hold for the cruise line itself and more importantly, for all the “kids”. However, I’ve also had a mental shift. It happened about four days ago, when once again my thoughts were heading down a “woe-is-me” track. I heard this little whisper: “You know … there are millions of people who will never have the opportunity to do what you are doing right now, sailing in beautiful waters on a wonderful ship. How about you make the most of it and remain grateful for the opportunity?” Trust me, the advice did not come from me – all the more reason I’m going to try to take it and hold on tight to it. After all, I’d really rather be “beautifully spoiled” than the other way around!

And, currently there are negotiations underway for another company to acquire Crystal, so we are very hopeful that we will be able to sail with them again in the future. AND, the crew has been told that all of them will be on board until the end of their current contracts, and they will all be paid for said contracts. Which has been a great relief for them.

And, thus ends the current saga — or at least as much as I know about it right now. Thanks for reading … and stay tuned. The next part of the story will appear in a third installment – coming soon.

If you’re interested in the back story of the business side of this, I recommend you pull up the article that was published in Forbes. Or, you can probably just google Crystal Cruises bankruptcy and get more information than you even want!