The luxury cruise ship is the most efficient delivery mechanism for the destination experience at scale. The MSC Bellissima or the Regent Seven Seas or the Silversea Silver Muse carries between three hundred and six thousand passengers to the same anchorages and the same ports that the Eighty2 visits on the Naora circumnavigation.
The same Greek islands. The same Caribbean anchorages. The same Pacific ports. The geography is identical. The ship and the offshore sailing catamaran are in the same water at the same coordinates. The experience is not the same experience in the way that the six thousand people and the twelve people produce the same experience at the same location at the same time in the same ocean.
The six thousand passengers who go ashore at Santorini arrive at the same staircase at the same time as the four other cruise ships that are also in the Santorini caldera on a Tuesday in August. The tender queue is forty-five minutes. The staircase is the staircase of the six thousand people from the six ships who are climbing it at the same time.
The village at the top is the village that has been reorganised around the six thousand people per ship times six ships per day since the cruise industry found it. The twelve Naora members who anchor in the caldera in the May before the cruise season begins are in the caldera before the six ships arrive. The staircase is the staircase. The village is the village. The caldera is the caldera. The scale changes everything about what the staircase and the village and the caldera are.
The Ocean Does Not Scale
The ocean does not scale with the ship that sails it. The Atlantic at six thousand passengers is the Atlantic at twelve members. The ocean is indifferent to the number of people on the vessel crossing it. What scales is the experience of the ocean: the six thousand passengers crossing the Atlantic on the Silver Muse are crossing it in the context of the six thousand people around them and the managed environment of the ship that insulates them from the ocean it is crossing.
The twelve Naora members crossing the Atlantic on the Eighty2 are crossing it in the context of the twelve people and the trade wind and the twenty-two days and the ocean that the catamaran hull is directly in rather than the ocean that the cruise ship’s deck is seven decks above. The ocean is the same size. The experience is not the same scale.
