This is not a guide to solo cruising. It is an account of not going on one. Twice. Written by a man who used to work on the ships.
I should get the credentials out of the way before I embarrass myself with the rest of it.
I spent a good part of my thirties at sea, working as a photographer and then as a photo manager. I started on Sea Princess, six months of Caribbean itineraries out of Miami: Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Jamaica, and a private island where the catering crew carried the entire lunch ashore and laid out a buffet on the sand, all of it included, so that for one day of the week nobody aboard had to reach for a wallet at all. Later there was Mistral, out of Venice, threading the Greek islands, with Dubrovnik on the run, which I loved then and have never quite got over. Later still Oceana, for P&O, running European itineraries out of Southampton. She was the identical twin of the ship I had started on, built to the same plans in the same yard, a fact my memory has been quietly mangling for twenty-five years and which is a story for another day.
So I know ships. I know where the ice machines are. I know which stairwell nobody uses. I know that the promenade deck at six in the morning is a great deal busier than a landlubber would ever guess, because three laps of it came to roughly a mile and there were always a few passengers determined to walk off the previous evening.
On the first morning of a cruise that deck belongs to them. Joggers, brisk walkers, the small heroic contingent not yet defeated by a ship that feeds you around the clock. By the final morning most of them have surrendered and are watching the sunrise horizontally, from a sunbed, with a coffee. Threading between them are the towel carriers, up at dawn purely to claim a lounger they have no intention of sitting on for another five hours, and the people cutting through on their way to the upper decks. And the crew, who at that hour are only ever officers, shop staff, gym, spa and photographers, because those were the ones of us with the run of the passenger areas.
I could also once do something I now find close to unimaginable, which is to stand in front of three hundred strangers on formal night and cheerfully bully them into a group photograph. I was paid to do it. I was good at it. I could work a queue of two thousand people and enjoy myself thoroughly.
Then I got divorced, and that man packed up and left without giving a forwarding address.
The first time I did not go
Some years ago I booked a solo cruise through Singles Cruise. Paid the deposit. Told nobody, which should have been my first clue.
Over the following weeks I talked myself out of it with the thoroughness of a man assembling a legal case against himself. When I finally rang to cancel, they could not have been kinder. They returned the deposit without a single question, in the practised tone of people who do this rather more often than you would think.
I would have preferred rudeness, frankly. Rudeness I could have argued with.
The second time I did not go
Last year I got as far as Norwegian. Studio cabins, no single supplement, the one line that has genuinely built something for people travelling alone. I read everything. I compared deck plans. I did the sort of research I would normally invoice somebody for.
Then I spent the money on three months in Vietnam and Thailand instead, and told anyone who asked that it was simple arithmetic. Which, in fairness, it is. By the time you have bought a flight from the UK to Spain to join the ship, and then a flight home from the States at the far end of it, you have spent about twice what a return to Bangkok costs, and I have never been a man who requires a smart hotel. A fortnight at sea and three months in Asia land on more or less the same number. It is true. It is even sensible.
It is not why I did not go.
The forty-four square feet
Here is the figure that lodged in my head and refused to leave. Divide the passenger space on a cruise ship by the number of passengers aboard and you get something in the region of forty-four square feet each. Roughly a garden shed, shared with several thousand people, in the middle of an ocean, for a fortnight, with no way off.
A number like that does not sit quietly once it is in. It brings friends. What if it is crowded. What if I panic. Where would I actually go. What do I do at dinner. What happens on the third night, when I have run out of ways to be pleasant.
The part where I know better
And here is the genuinely absurd bit, the part I have turned over more times than is good for me.
I know the answer. I know it better than almost anybody who will read this.
Forty-four square feet is an average, and averages lie. Passengers do not distribute themselves evenly about a ship. They cluster, and they cluster so predictably that you could set a watch by it, which means that at almost any hour of almost any day there are entire rooms on that vessel with nobody whatsoever in them. Quiet is not hidden on a cruise ship. It is merely unfashionable.
I did not learn that from a brochure. I learned it because on a sea day you are working between 12-14hr shifts, your time off has to be planned with the precision of a military landing, and you become extremely good indeed at knowing which room will be empty at ten past three. I could still draw you the map.
The ships now are bigger still. Twice the size of the ones I worked on, with whole neighbourhoods built for people who want somewhere quiet to sit.
I knew all of this. I knew all of it when I paid both deposits.
I booked anyway, and I still did not go.
What not going has taught me
What I have slowly understood is that the information was never the problem. I did not cancel for want of facts. I had the facts. I had better facts than the cruise line’s own website.
Anxiety is not an argument, which is why you cannot win it with one. It does not want data. It wants a guarantee, and travel has never in its entire history offered anybody a guarantee. What travel offers is a gangway and a decision.
I have written before about travelling with anxiety and not letting it choose the destination, and I stand by every word of it. I should be honest, though, that on this one it has chosen. Twice outright, and a good few more times in the years I simply never raised the subject with myself at all.
Why I am writing this down
Partly because this website started life as a diary and has quietly turned into a reference library, which was nobody’s plan.
Mostly because I do not believe I am unusual. Somebody reading this has a cruise brochure in a drawer and has had it there for two years. Somebody has got as far as the payment page and closed the laptop. Somebody loved cruising once, with a person who is no longer there, and cannot work out how to do it as one instead of two.
I am not going to finish with a resolution, because I have not got one. I have booked nothing. The embarrassment of having cancelled twice sits there quietly and makes a third attempt feel like a far bigger undertaking than it is, which I can see is nonsense even as I type it.
But the ships are still sailing. The lower decks are still empty at two in the afternoon. And I still want to go.
Related Articles You May Enjoy:
If you would like the practical half of what I learned working on those ships, I have written about where the quiet actually is on a cruise ship, and about how cruise ship photography actually works, which is the job I used to do.
A note on how I write: Every trip starts with a journal, filled in wherever I happen to be; on a bus, plane, train, or in a backstreet cafe that has clearly seen better days. It’s not tidy, and it’s not always legible even to me. When I get the time, I use AI to help turn those notes into something readable, organising drafts and occasionally rescuing a sentence that has wandered off without me. The experiences, the perspective, the humour and every editorial decision remain entirely mine. As for the photos, I’m not remotely fond of having my picture taken, family portraits included, so I also use AI to help visualise the places and moments I write about.
