The end of the world (cruise) and burning DVD's for 37 hours!

I cannot believe that this is chapter 50 of my cruise ship diaries so I'd like to thank everyone thats been reading my ramblings and recollections so far.

We were finally coming to the end of the world cruise and was on the way back to Sydney completing 75 days since we left months earlier, depedning on your department a world cruise can be a dream or a nightmare as you are going to largely be stuck with the same PAX for the whole cruise. If you were a cabin attendant or worked in the spa it was probably hard going as most cabin stewards get their tips off the guests at the end of the cruise so if you have new guests every week or so it will be much more money.

Like in the spa, how many treatments and massages are the same group of people really going to have in 3 months, thankfully a world cruise is a licence to print money for the video department as we have one product they only have to buy once that they collect at the end of the cruise, also if you can afford $20,000+ for a cabin then you can afford $300 for 6 DVD's of your trip as well.

Logistically we had the planning down pretty well, internally the cruise was split up into 3 legs so as each leg was finished we'd count up our pre-orders and make sure we burned off enough copies of each legs DVD to fill all the pre-orders as we went. We strongly encouraged everyone to pre-order as if too many people went to order the DVD's on the last day as an impulse purchase there was a chance we would not have time to burn off all the copies in time.

The photo department had similar issues with an absolute ton of requests from PAX asking for pictures from months ago on the last few days, 'well i was wearing this dress...' okay and what port was the picture taken in?' 'oh Hawaii I think...no Vietnam..You can see how much of a ballache that would be, In fact I'm fairly certain Mick the manager made sure and re-iterated to the PAX they had deadlines throughout the cruise and due to the sheer amount of photos and lack of storage / display space onboard they had to make their final purchases for each leg of the cruise as they went.

We had a few seadays after our final port of call (one being the last day before Sydney) and that meant almost 2 days solid of constant burning of DVD's and printing out of DVD covers. I forget the exact number but we'd already hit our video sales target by the start of the 2nd leg so everything over now was bonus money in our pockets. We had 3 rickety dvd burning towers with multiple issues, one would overheat after an hour and you could only tell this by the fact it would start spitting out FAIL on DVD after DVD. Both the other machines also had damaged drives so we could never get a full run of 12 from each machine, also the time it took depended on how much video was on the DVD. So if we were close to 4.4 GB then it would take much longer to burn than if it was around 2GB, in the end we could burn around 8-12 DVD's every 15 minutes.

So if for example a 100 people decided on the last day they also wanted to order the 6 DVD set over what we had already covered with pre-orders then it was going to take approximately 37 hours to burn the discs. I forget how many extra we sold but all I remember was the sheer sweatshop insanity of constantly burning DVD's for two days solid. Once the discs were spat out of the burners we then had to put these stupid AVERY labels on them which we run out of at one point and had to source locally in port, you do question your sanity when sticky labels are a major point of contention in your day.

As I'd mentioned the photo team to me at least was not getting on and everyone kept to themselves and did the bare minimum as they were all burnt out and ready to go home. On the Coral when I was left by myself for a few cruises the rest of the team jumped in to help me out, here facing a straight 37 hours of burning DVD's we had no additional help from the photo team but we did from the spa!

Yes, thank god for the spa girls who in their free time helped us label and box hundreds of DVD's and also ensuring themselves free copies for helping!

By that fateful final morning most of the backroom area was full up of hundreds of boxes of DVD's ready to be handed out, neither of us had slept more than an hour or two in shifts and we still needed to keep going burning DVD's throughout the day, not to mention several crew members who were leaving the next day and just popped in asking for a free DVD set of the world cruise. Now you don't mind doing this for friends or people who were actually in the video, crew members who you knew but when it was someone you'd never spoken to in 6 months and they just expect a freebie!! I shouted more than one person out of that video room that day!

There were lines of people queued alpabetically by deck number waiting for the photo gallery to open, to this day it is the most people I've ever seen waiting to collect a DVD on a last day. I remember being greeted with 'your late' and some attitude by one of the photogs when we dropped the lists and last batch of DVD's off, I could have said something more but that would have been unprofessional in front of the guests, instead I simply smiled and walked away.

I spent the rest of the day burning DVD's as we had underestimated the amount we'd sell on the day but by the time we had finished we had sold a fleet record of approximately $75,000 in the 3 months of the world cruise.

Looking back I wish I'd been a bit more experienced when I did my first world cruise as I let my personal life and the bar interfere a little too much with my work and it really was a mixed bag overall, still in that 3 months I'd been to American Samoa, New Zealand, Austrailia, South Korea, Thailand, Fiji, Russia, USA, Vietnam, Malyasia, Tahiti, Cambodia, Japan & Canada to name just a few.

I now had one cruise left around New Caledonia and the South Pacifc before I finished my 2nd contract.

On the next cruise diaries - Last cruise on the Sun Princess!