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Subtitled The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America’s Cruise-Ship Empires
I went on a cruise! I was careful not to read a lot ahead of time, because I was afraid I’d chicken out. But you know, I could have read this one ahead of time. It is gossipy, well-sourced, and a fast read.
After WW2, the passenger liners that had once been the main way to cross an ocean, were replaced by jet travel. Boats were cheap. Ship yards were desperate for business. And during the leadup to WW2, the US had flagged vessels in other countries as part of Lend-Lease, so there were court decisions in the US that the US didn’t have jurisdiction over vessels flagged in those other countries. The combination led a variety of enterprising people to collect some boats, have them redone to provide more on-board entertainment, and run them out of Miami to various Caribbean ports as a vacation destination. They didn’t have to pay their labor — collected from around the world — US minimum wages. They were largely free of a lot of regulation, and, more importantly, because they were flagged out of the US, they could dodge a lot of taxes as well. The fees to the countries they registered at were pretty minimal.
Garin covers the initial forays into this business, and the collapse of the combination of Arison / NCL, then spends a lot of the book on the sparring between Carnival and Royal Caribbean. This is sort of a pity, because it’s not like NCL is entirely out of the picture, and they have continued to innovate (they even run a Hawaiian cruise ship, the only cruise ship flagged in the US in the post-war years, which thus gets to completely own cruising the Hawaiian Islands, because only US flagged ships can travel from a US port to a US port).
Other chapters touch upon how crime has been handled on board and some scandals in that area, pollution (both garbage dumping and oil / chemical / hazardous waste dumping), illness on board and the problems of freely serving alcohol and people winding up overboard.
The book was published in 2005. Thus, Disney Cruise Lines only appears in its earlier incarnation, lending its name to Premier’s Big Red Boat. While the newer incarnation of DCL as its own line did exist at the time of writing, it was such a small operator, and had not yet started winning tons of awards, that it is unsurprising Garin left it out.
Garin spends a chapter discussing port fees and the politics of Caribbean nations. This is a pretty good chapter, albeit brief, and Garin does point interested readers at another good (with a revised edition, but not available on kindle, and also fairly old at this point) book on the topic of the politics of United Statesians vacationing in the Caribbean (_Last Resorts_, haven’t read it, may do so, but will first look for something a bit more current). Unfortunately, while Garin does spend a fair amount of time depicting the back and forth of port fees, and the struggles of island nations to balance their increasingly desperate need for tourist dollars against the costs associated with those tourists, Garin absolutely misses an opportunity to show how the two majors (Carnival and Royal Caribbean) are screwing themselves over by pushing port fees so incredibly low.
When we stopped in Nassau, we heard complaints from crew about how long it was taking for the new port to be finished — I think we probably asked what that building was over there. Along with those complaints was a passing remark about the port fee being paid by Disney. R. and I looked at the port building, thought about the port fee, did a little math based on the calendar, and concluded that that port building was going to take a whole lot longer to finish, _because_ port fees were too low. Now, I’m sure someone could produce a (pretty creepy, colonialist) argument about how if you give them more money, it’ll just be wasted and won’t produce a port building any quicker anyway. But the scale of the fees Nassau is collecting is not commensurate with finishing that building any time soon. *shrug*
The specific opportunity Garin missed is when they were about to evade yet another very small rise in port fees earmarked for a waste management system, and the World Bank basically said, hey, knock it off, the governments of the islands _must_ collect this fee, the big loan we are making the islands to building the system is contingent on the fee, and your customers are why this thing has to be built anyway. The majors backed down. That right there is as compelling a proof as anyone could need that the majors are harming themselves by forcing port fees so low (allowing, of course, for the risk that higher port fees might be siphoned off and thus not produce real benefits either).
It’s a minor point; I have belabored it.
Overall, it’s an interesting story of an industrial sector that, through a combination of clever avoidance of many of the ordinary costs of doing business with United Statesians (taxes, regulation), a global supply chain (labor from around the world) and careful management of image and risks (The Love Boat, working with the CDC to reduce shipboard illness) grew very rapidly in the postwar period, first proliferating and then consolidating.
I would really love to read a newer book / updated edition that covered things like NCL’s Pride of America, the rise of DCL and family cruising, and increasing conflict as adults start looking for adult-only experiences and have more and more trouble finding it. It is super clear that the demographic of who is cruising evolved over the course of the time covered by Garin, but it has also changed a lot since that book. It is probably too soon to cover the change to LNG fuel.
I went on a cruise! I was careful not to read a lot ahead of time, because I was afraid I’d chicken out. But you know, I could have read this one ahead of time. It is gossipy, well-sourced, and a fast read.
After WW2, the passenger liners that had once been the main way to cross an ocean, were replaced by jet travel. Boats were cheap. Ship yards were desperate for business. And during the leadup to WW2, the US had flagged vessels in other countries as part of Lend-Lease, so there were court decisions in the US that the US didn’t have jurisdiction over vessels flagged in those other countries. The combination led a variety of enterprising people to collect some boats, have them redone to provide more on-board entertainment, and run them out of Miami to various Caribbean ports as a vacation destination. They didn’t have to pay their labor — collected from around the world — US minimum wages. They were largely free of a lot of regulation, and, more importantly, because they were flagged out of the US, they could dodge a lot of taxes as well. The fees to the countries they registered at were pretty minimal.
Garin covers the initial forays into this business, and the collapse of the combination of Arison / NCL, then spends a lot of the book on the sparring between Carnival and Royal Caribbean. This is sort of a pity, because it’s not like NCL is entirely out of the picture, and they have continued to innovate (they even run a Hawaiian cruise ship, the only cruise ship flagged in the US in the post-war years, which thus gets to completely own cruising the Hawaiian Islands, because only US flagged ships can travel from a US port to a US port).
Other chapters touch upon how crime has been handled on board and some scandals in that area, pollution (both garbage dumping and oil / chemical / hazardous waste dumping), illness on board and the problems of freely serving alcohol and people winding up overboard.
The book was published in 2005. Thus, Disney Cruise Lines only appears in its earlier incarnation, lending its name to Premier’s Big Red Boat. While the newer incarnation of DCL as its own line did exist at the time of writing, it was such a small operator, and had not yet started winning tons of awards, that it is unsurprising Garin left it out.
Garin spends a chapter discussing port fees and the politics of Caribbean nations. This is a pretty good chapter, albeit brief, and Garin does point interested readers at another good (with a revised edition, but not available on kindle, and also fairly old at this point) book on the topic of the politics of United Statesians vacationing in the Caribbean (_Last Resorts_, haven’t read it, may do so, but will first look for something a bit more current). Unfortunately, while Garin does spend a fair amount of time depicting the back and forth of port fees, and the struggles of island nations to balance their increasingly desperate need for tourist dollars against the costs associated with those tourists, Garin absolutely misses an opportunity to show how the two majors (Carnival and Royal Caribbean) are screwing themselves over by pushing port fees so incredibly low.
When we stopped in Nassau, we heard complaints from crew about how long it was taking for the new port to be finished — I think we probably asked what that building was over there. Along with those complaints was a passing remark about the port fee being paid by Disney. R. and I looked at the port building, thought about the port fee, did a little math based on the calendar, and concluded that that port building was going to take a whole lot longer to finish, _because_ port fees were too low. Now, I’m sure someone could produce a (pretty creepy, colonialist) argument about how if you give them more money, it’ll just be wasted and won’t produce a port building any quicker anyway. But the scale of the fees Nassau is collecting is not commensurate with finishing that building any time soon. *shrug*
The specific opportunity Garin missed is when they were about to evade yet another very small rise in port fees earmarked for a waste management system, and the World Bank basically said, hey, knock it off, the governments of the islands _must_ collect this fee, the big loan we are making the islands to building the system is contingent on the fee, and your customers are why this thing has to be built anyway. The majors backed down. That right there is as compelling a proof as anyone could need that the majors are harming themselves by forcing port fees so low (allowing, of course, for the risk that higher port fees might be siphoned off and thus not produce real benefits either).
It’s a minor point; I have belabored it.
Overall, it’s an interesting story of an industrial sector that, through a combination of clever avoidance of many of the ordinary costs of doing business with United Statesians (taxes, regulation), a global supply chain (labor from around the world) and careful management of image and risks (The Love Boat, working with the CDC to reduce shipboard illness) grew very rapidly in the postwar period, first proliferating and then consolidating.
I would really love to read a newer book / updated edition that covered things like NCL’s Pride of America, the rise of DCL and family cruising, and increasing conflict as adults start looking for adult-only experiences and have more and more trouble finding it. It is super clear that the demographic of who is cruising evolved over the course of the time covered by Garin, but it has also changed a lot since that book. It is probably too soon to cover the change to LNG fuel.