‘I had a dream job on a cruise ship but there was dark side’ | Cruise | Travel

For many of us sitting at a desk doing the nine to five, a job on a cruise ship sounds like a dream. Who wouldn’t want to get paid for sailing around the world and enjoying the glitz and glamour promised by these huge cruise ships?

Sam Catling spent years at sea as a cruise ship entertainer, and while he shares many fond memories of being on the water, the 38-year-old is cautioning others considering entering the industry that it comes with a side few people see. His podcast, Deck Tales, speaks to people across the maritime world, often uncovering shocking stories about life on the water. He’s also written a book, Seems Like Smooth Sailing, about the ups and downs of his former job.

Sam was just 18 and working in a job he described as a ‘trolley wally’, collecting trollies at Asda, when his mum and grandma came back from a cruise. Having spoken to the entertainers on board, his family members suggested that he pursue a career on the waves. Despite having no experience, he decided to apply.

“I used to get The Stage magazine delivered to my newsagent on a weekly basis, and I kept looking through the ads,” said Sam. “Eventually, I saw one that said ‘now receiving applications for entertainment hosts,’ so I applied.

“The first question was ‘what previous experience do you have working in entertainment?’, and eventually I wrote ‘I’ve had extensive experience pushing trolleys around Asda car park for the past two years.’”

Yet, despite his candid answer and lack of professional training beyond a drama GCSE and some dance workshops, Sam was hired and soon found himself on board a ship in dry dock in Gibraltar, attending two weeks of rehearsals while the ship was refurbished.

Sam’s early days on the job were intense: “My first week as an entertainer doing stuff was Christmas week or thereabouts for the first group of passengers, and it was a bit nerve-wracking.” Sam started off hosting quizzes and sports events, soon moving up to run game shows, karaoke, and poolside fun “just to get me to kind of where I needed to be before I was comfortable standing in front of a crowd full of people, all on holiday.”

He was part of a larger entertainment team, which included a show team with musicians, kids’ hosts, technicians, and a cruise director, working alongside people who put on elaborate West End-style shows.

But not every day was full of glitz and glamour. Sam said: “There’s the mundane. There are things you don’t want to have to do, like sitting in the library for an hour just to help people return and take out books. There are drills at the beginning of every cruise and during as well. We needed to be prepared for anything, so there were fire drills, emergency evacuation drills, and bomb drills.

“But every day could be different to a certain extent. The guests make it different every time because there are thousands of new people coming in, different complaints, and different experiences. So it made the job fresh.”

Sam admits the job was gruelling. “I was burning the candle at both ends. I was 19, so I immediately became quite the social drinker. My job was to be socialising with the guests at certain times during the day. They actually had it in the schedule for an hour here and there.

“Doing these activities, that’s not enough, they wanted us to go out and actually socialise and talk to people. Go up to a group of people being like ‘Hey guys, how’s your cruise? Mind if I join you?” and you’d sit down and they’d offer you a drink because they’re all-inclusive.’

The social aspect meant Sam often didn’t finish until past midnight, and would then hit the crew bar until 2am, rising at 7am for his next shift. He’d often work seven days a week and admitted: “Between your different activities that you’d host I was down in my cabin having a power nap. If I had an indoor cabin, I’d just close the door, and you were in pitch black darkness, so it was really easy to just have a 30-minute nap.”

He added: “You wouldn’t know what time of day it was because you’re cutting out all the sunlight. So sometimes I had moments where I didn’t know what time zone I was in, or my body didn’t know when it was. I was in my cabin having a snooze, and then all of a sudden, my phone went off like an industrial fire alarm, and really woke me up.”

His roommates often came from his own department. “I shared with DJs, technicians, and show team members. The only exceptions of having your own cabin are if you’re in management, or if you’re a fly-on entertainer, you come on the cruise to do two or three shows. Or you’re the main singer in the production show team.”

And while he says “there was one or two I loved living with”, Sam goes on to say there could be issues living in close quarters with a stranger. “Some came on a little bit strong and didn’t know when no was a no. I just remember one very annoying guy that was just refusing to admit that I didn’t fancy him and got drunk and would get into my bed a sweaty, hot mess and cuddle me. I’d tell him ‘get the f**** out now or I will scream.'”

Sam eventually had to ask to change cabins due to his roommate’s unacceptable behaviour. His bunkmate wasn’t the only one who could be inappropriate. Sam told me “One person mistook my kindness and social energy for being like ‘oh yeah, he’s interested.’@

And it’s a common theme with his podcast guests too, with guests mistaking friendliness for a come-on. Sam said there was a particularly bad incident: “One guy was too much, and I nearly knocked him out, so I had to go and report him. I was able to go back to my cabin for the evening and told I wouldn’t need to socialise in guest areas until that man was off the ship.”

But “there was very little wiggle room” when it came to crew having sexual encounters with guests. “If you do something like that and you’re caught, you’re immediately disembarked. I mean, so people do it if they like someone enough. Some people got away with it more than others, and in some cases, greased the palms of security to allow it.”

While Sam was traveling around the globe, he said it was often difficult to get the time off to explore, and “if you’re really set on going to a particular place, you’d have to try and get another colleague to cover you. You could do that in our department sometimes.

“On other occasions, they have a thing called port manning where you’re not allowed to get off the ship. The list has been drawn up and your name is down, and that’s a legal requirement by maritime law to stay and ensure the ship is manned correctly.” The longest he spent at sea without setting foot on dry land was nine days.

But Sam did manage to see some incredible places. He named some of his favourite spots as Bali, the Seychelles, and Australia, adding: “There have been some amazing islands that you’d have to get a magnifying glass out to be able to go back and say, ‘Oh yeah, I went there.'”

Crew members get room and board as part of their contract. Sam revealed that when he started his job in 2006, he was earning about £1,200 to £1,300 a month from working seven days a week. “But, you know, you’re not paying rent, your food’s taken care of, you’ve no heating and electric and gas bills and all of that stuff. It’s all taken care of, which is nice! You don’t have to worry about all those things. But then you are spending money when you go ashore, you know, going to eat out, because after a couple of weeks of being on board you are sick of the food.”

Sam said that while he missed family and friends during his contracts, “you were so busy all the time it was hard to really miss them. My first month or so I didn’t speak to anyone back home because I was rushed off my feet.”

Sam’s first contract was six months, making it difficult to go back home to visit family unless there was an emergency situation. His mum helped him cope with long stints at sea by sending care packages in a shoe box, which Sam said included pickled onion Monster Munch, Nice ‘n Spicy Nik Naks, and CDs of some of the music in the charts at the time.

The day Sam’s book was published coincided with COVID lockdowns, and this made him curious about how the industry would respond to being shut down. In his own words, looking deeper into the industry “opened a Pandora’s box” and led to him “learning about stuff in the industry that you obviously haven’t got a chance to learn whilst you’re working within it, because you’re just so busy.”

The Deck Tales podcast now has over 60 episodes, and Sam says he’s uncovered many negative tales about people working in cruises and the general maritime incudstry such as “the way certain crew are treated, the hierarchies, unfair dismissals. What I experienced towards the end was an unfair dismissal. But I’ve also heard that’s quite common across a lot of different companies. They’ll just find a reason and get rid of you for no, you know, good cause. It’s just like, ‘Oh well, we’ve got plenty of people that we can put in that position. Let’s just get rid of them.’”

He also highlighted that many cruise workers were treated badly during lockdown. “In a lot of cases, the guests were sent home on chartered flights as soon as possible, whereas the crew was stuck on board and they couldn’t go ashore because it was lockdown.

“They weren’t being told when they were going to get to go home and be repatriated; they weren’t working, so they were going a bit mad. And in many cases, they weren’t being paid. So effectively, they were prisoners on their own ship. And then if, obviously, they got a little bit sick, they were confined to their cabin. They couldn’t go out. So, this was one of the things that essentially made me go, ‘Wow, this is awful.’

“I heard about a number of incidents where crew sadly took their own lives because it became too much for them.”

Hearing these tales motivated Sam to launch his podcast and give a voice to people who might otherwise not have a platform.

Nowadays, Sam combines his podcasting with handyman and TV extra work. He’s also written a second book, which he hopes to launch soon. He added: “This is my passion. I want to continue doing this until I’m an old man, because there’s 70% of the planet that’s covered in ocean, so I don’t think I’m going to run out of guests anytime soon. The podcast started with just being a platform for cruise ship crew, but now it’s something else. It’s cargo ship captains, I’ve spoken to a pirate, I’ve had a deep sea salvage scuba diver and tugboat captains.

“I just really wanted to drill down into something unique and authentic, and within a specific niche that people might not know about; the stories at sea that most people don’t hear. The public might not have an interest in ships, but people are still people, and the stories that happen at sea are there for everyone to hear about.”

Listen to the Deck Tales podcast here.

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