



Stephanie Davidson’s office window overlooks South Boston. But in a few hours, it will offer a hypnotic view of clear skies above an open sea with nothing else in sight.
Davidson works aboard the Norwegian Dawn, a cruise ship calling today in Boston before leaving for Bermuda, on which her job is helping passengers book future travel.
When she finished school, said Davidson, “I wanted to travel. I wanted to see the world.’’
A lot of people like her are also catching rides as crewmembers aboard ship, saving money on food and rent and enjoying new amenities provided by an industry whose demand for workers is growing in both size and scope.
“There are a lot more opportunities out there,’’ said Petros Zarpanely, a former recruitment director for Silversea Cruises who now runs his own recruitment and training company for yacht and ship jobs.
A record 24 million people are expected to take cruises this year, according to the Cruise Lines International Association, or CLIA. That’s up 68 percent in the last decade.
Many of these passengers will travel aboard massive new ships. Seven were added to the world’s fleets last year, and 15 more are due to launch this year and next. And the number of employees required to keep these ships afloat has reached 314,000.
These are no longer solely sailors, engineers, bartenders, and waiters. As cruise companies wage a battle of amenities, they need the likes of rock-climbing guides, figure skaters, astronomers, golf pros, retail clerks, stagehands, and IT experts.
Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas, the biggest cruise ship in the world, for instance, has 2,100 crewmembers — more employees than previous generations of ships had passengers.
Even the people who work in these jobs “are always a little bit blown away, because each ship has something new and something bigger,’’ said Sydney Brown, an acrobat and high-diver in the vessel’s AquaTheater.
As a gymnast, Brown aspired to work for Cirque du Soleil. Then her father saw an ad for jobs at sea, and she applied, intending to work aboard ship for six months before returning to training. That was six years ago, and Brown has signed up for a new tour next year on another ship.
“Ship life is awesome and I’m getting paid for traveling the world,’’ said Brown, 25, whose Instagram account of photos showing her and her crewmates in exotic locales has attracted 135,000 followers. “It’s never boring.’’
Meanwhile, she said, “You’re saving money — you don’t have to pay rent, you don’t have to pay for food. Everything I’m making I’m saving.’’
There are downsides to working aboard a cruise ship. The hours are long and some crewmembers are on duty seven days a week, dealing with often-demanding passengers, though specialists such as Brown get days off and can leave the ship when it’s in port.
“We obviously want people who are open minded and are able to live and work in the same place,’’ said Christian Weindorf, senior director of talent acquisition and development for Norwegian Cruise Line. “When you work shoreside, after your shift you go home. On board the ship, you’re still there. It takes special people to be able to do that.’’
Or, as Davidson puts it — excusing herself to answer questions for a passenger — “You have to go with the flow.’’
Except for officers and department heads, cruise ship employees also often share cabins; Brown’s is equipped with bunk beds.
Still, she said, “You’re never really in there, except for sleeping.’’
For all of this, 80 percent of crewmembers continue aboard after their first contracts have expired, the CLIA reports. And as demand for employees grows, cruise lines have vastly improved their benefits and accommodations.
“Everything the guests have, we have on a smaller scale,’’ said J.T. Watters, who signed aboard ship with the Holland America Line right out of college and has stayed for 10 years (“I don’t think anybody’s plan goes the way they think it will when they sign aboard a cruise ship,’’ he said), rising through the ranks to cruise director and visiting every continent.
Crew cabins have refrigerators, Wi-Fi, and flat-screen TVs, and there are crew gyms, 24-hour crew restaurants, and crew bars with massively subsidized prices — $1 beers, for example, Watters noted, to help take the edge off the long days.
“It becomes more and more important, what we offer to the crew,’’ said Tony Winkler, hotel director on the Norwegian Dawn, whose workers have a calendar of their own events including language courses and enrichment lectures. The 66 nationalities represented means behind-the-scenes celebrations of everything from the Fourth of July to Indonesian Independence Day; the week before, there was a crew party on the heliport deck while passengers were ashore in Bermuda, and Winkler was planning a crew barbecue. “There are a lot of things for the crew,’’ he said on a tour of the newly refitted ship that included the private crew pool in the bow.
Not all of this is driven by the competition for talent. The Marine Labor Convention, which took effect in 2013, set minimum requirements for crew accommodations, food, recreation, and medical care.
When Weindorf worked aboard ship himself, in the 1990s, he said, the many inconveniences included not being able to make a phone call from the ship, but having to wait for a port call to use a pay phone.
“Today we do a lot more for the crew in terms of crew welfare and life-work balance, simply because the industry has grown, and people are more demanding today,’’ he said.
Norwegian, which has 400 different job titles across its ships, hires through a network of 36 recruiting agencies around the world and uses headhunters to find officers and executive employees. Like most cruise lines, it also has an application form on its website.
Winkler recalled not only many newly minted college graduates among his staff, but also career-changers — a dentist, an accountant — and Watters has encountered the occasional retiree.
“It’s all over the board,’’ said Watters. After all, he said, “Every job you have on land, you have on the ship, too.’’
Jon Marcus can be reached at jon@mysecretboston.com.