The MSC World Europa is 333 metres long. It carries 6,762 passengers and approximately 2,700 crew. The facilities include twenty-one restaurants, five swimming pools, a full casino, a Broadway-style theatre, a Formula 1 simulator, a water park, an indoor ski slope, and a dedicated children’s club with full-time staff.
The ship is, by any measure, a remarkable feat of engineering and hospitality management. It is also, by the same measure, a city. When the MSC World Europa is at sea, approximately nine thousand people are living and working within its 333 metres. The world voyage on the MSC World Europa is the world voyage in the company of nine thousand people.
The Eighty2 is twenty-four metres long. It carries twelve members and a crew of four to five. The facilities include six private cabins, a well-equipped galley, a saloon with the navigation station, a dive platform, and the afterdeck where the evening is spent.
The ship is not a feat of engineering in the MSC sense, it is the feat of the offshore sailing vessel that was built to go offshore and that goes offshore. The world voyage on the Eighty2 is the world voyage in the company of sixteen people.
What Scale Does to the Experience
The scale of the cruise ship shapes the experience in ways that the ship’s marketing does not fully describe. The queue for the tender at the port call (the small boats that transfer the passengers from the anchored ship to the dock when the port cannot accommodate the ship alongside) can involve several hundred people waiting for their tender ticket time.
The popular excursion that fills before the passenger has had the chance to book it, because 6,762 passengers competing for the limited capacity of the destination’s best experience produces the competitive booking dynamic that the small print of the world cruise brochure does not fully prepare the passenger for. The dinner reservation at the speciality restaurant on the evening the sea conditions make the buffet uncomfortable, the restaurant that seats 120 people and that 6,762 passengers are competing to book.
These are not failures of the cruise experience. They are the structural consequences of the scale that makes the cruise ship commercially viable and that the passenger who chooses the cruise is, on some level, choosing along with the ship.
The scale produces the social richness, the three thousand people on the pool deck on the sea day, the full theatre for the Broadway show, the casino that is always open, that the passenger who wants the world voyage as the socially immersive, comprehensively entertained, logistically managed experience is choosing the cruise for. The scale is not the problem. It is the product.
What Twelve Produces That Six Thousand Cannot
Twelve people on a twenty-four-metre boat in the open ocean produces the specific quality of the community that the scale of the cruise ship makes structurally impossible. The twelve people who have shared the night watch and the rough sea and the first whale shark and the provisioning morning and the twenty days of the Atlantic crossing know each other in the specific way that the shared extreme experience produces, not the acquaintance of the ship’s passengers who nodded at each other at the buffet, but the knowledge of the people who were in the same difficult situation at the same time and whose response to it is now part of how each understands the other.
The cruise ship passenger who wants to meet interesting people on the world cruise will meet interesting people, 6,762 passengers over four months includes many interesting people and the social programme of the ship is designed to create the encounters that produce the connections. But the connection formed over the tender queue and the deck chair and the cocktail party is the connection of the social occasion.
The connection formed over the night watch and the whale shark and the Long Table in the offshore anchorage is the connection of the shared experience. Both are real. They are not the same thing.
The Naora voyage and the cruise world voyage are both the world voyage. They share the aspiration and they do not share the experience. The cruise is the world voyage at the scale of the city. The Naora circumnavigation is the world voyage at the scale of the offshore sailing community: twelve people, four oceans, five years, the world as it is rather than the world as the infrastructure of the 333-metre ship is able to service it.
The choice between them is the choice between two genuinely different things. The comparison that matters is not the price comparison. It is the experience comparison. And that comparison is not made on the website. It is made in the thirty-minute conversation.
