A viral nine-month world cruise saw plenty of drama, but not the kind you’d expect

When Royal Caribbean’s “Ultimate World Cruise” sailed out of Miami and into social media virality in December, it promised an unforgettable 9 months:

For passengers, a once-in-a-lifetime journey to all seven continents.

And for viewers, a 360-degree stream of on-board drama, as instructed from the perspective of a rotating solid of characters (since folks might be a part of at any level for a number of segments of the trip).

Many of the roughly 650 full-timers on board began posting movies to TikTok and Instagram, filming their routines at sea and explorations on shore. And a handful of present content material creators — firmly rooted on land, from New York to California — studied and synthesized these movies to report on the cruise in actual time.

They recapped the week’s occasions, launched new characters, chased down rumors utilizing their onboard contacts and speculated about what varieties of spectacles lay forward. One even made a bingo card, with squares starting from an early departure to a pirate takeover.

The potential for drama was so excessive, and the content material so ubiquitous, that followers started referring to the cruise as a “TikTok reality show,” at the same time as some apprehensive that on-line hype would warp or in any other case worsen passengers’ actual lives.

Last week — after 274 nights, greater than 60 nations and plenty of hundreds of thousands of social media views — the cruise got here to an finish. Which means it’s lastly time to ask: How did it dwell as much as the hype?

“This absolutely should have been a reality TV show. It would have won so many awards,” mentioned Kara Harms, who runs a journey and life-style model and lined the cruise on social media — she created two bingo playing cards, the first of which took solely a pair of weeks to get to bingo.

NPR caught up with a number of individuals who had been both on board the ship or following it intently on social media.

They all spoke of forming lifelong friendships, marveling at world wonders (both firsthand or vicariously) and usually increasing their cultural horizons. They additionally confirmed that the expertise wasn’t with out drama.

“I mean, you cannot stick that many people together in a small space and not have there be drama,” mentioned passenger and TikTokker Jenny Hunnicutt.

But it wasn’t essentially the kind that individuals had anticipated, like romance rumors or interpersonal beefs. The greater scandals got here from a lot heavier exterior elements — like politics, warfare and literal forces of nature — that passengers needed to climate throughout their time collectively.

The ship rerouted a leg of its journey to keep away from the ongoing battle in the Red Sea, bought delayed by climate protesters in Amsterdam and narrowly missed a massive earthquake in Taiwan. Passengers needed to be evacuated from Iceland’s Blue Lagoon as a result of of volcanic exercise. And on board, many adopted — and more and more fought over — the many twists and turns of the fast-approaching U.S. presidential election.

“I think they definitely started with the more light, fun things like running out of wine or the boat’s flooding from a storm or stuff like that,” Harms defined. “And then they really launched into the realities of what happens when you sail a ship around the world for nine months: You’re gonna encounter a lot of real things that happen.”

The actual lives behind TikTok’s actuality present

When NPR first spoke to content material creators in January, simply weeks into the cruise, the anticipation — and a few nervousness — was obvious.

While passengers had been enthusiastic about embarking on an journey, some had been apprehensive about their in a single day web fame and the way it might have an effect on the dynamics on board.

Many embraced it, mentioned Hunnicutt, who notes that some content material creators on board began going viral earlier than they’d even met one another. That buzz introduced them collectively in these early days and set in movement some lasting friendships.

“With the reality show comparison, we definitely leaned into that online in the beginning,” she mentioned. “But this wasn’t a reality show that we had signed up for and signed a contract, right? These were real life. So there was always that … you have to be very mindful of others.”

Videos from and about the cruise captivated social media for the first a number of months of the cruise, which creators say is a powerful quantity of time for a development to carry viewers’ consideration.

As curiosity in the cruise unfold throughout social media, two influencers who had been watching from land bought sponsorship offers to come on board for brief stints — and promised to take their many followers behind the scenes with them. By the time each had come and gone, viewers curiosity started to dip (one passenger factors out this was round the time the ship arrived in China, the place the worldwide model of TikTok is unavailable).

Harms in the reduction of on her cruise content material but nonetheless saved tabs on what was taking place on board.

“By this point, I have spent a lot of time forming these parasocial relationships with all these people on the cruise, but also some actual relationships, like DM’ing some people on there and forming semi-close friendships,” she explains.

As time handed, and the passengers and creators on land grew nearer, the cruise protection took on much less of a gossip-rag really feel.

Multiple folks instructed NPR that after the preliminary frenzy calmed down, TikTokkers realized how the social media hypothesis might influence passengers’ actual lives, for higher or worse. The handful of land-based creators ended up working collectively to resolve whether or not to amplify sure tales or hyperlink again to sure movies.

“You just really want to make sure that people trapped on the boat with a bunch of strangers are having the best time possible, because at the end of the day, they paid money to be here, and it’s an experience and it’s a vacation for them,” Harms added.

Beth Anne Fletcher, a photographer who gained a large following overlaying the cruise from her dwelling in Derbyshire, England (“as far away from an ocean as you can possibly get” in the UK), estimates she’s made some 300 movies about it this 12 months.

Of these, movies about folks and the “so-called drama” tended to carry out the finest. But after listening to from viewers who wished to comply with together with the precise journey, she began making location-focused recaps too.

“For me, it was never about, I want to continually go viral,” Fletcher mentioned. “It was more about, well, these people are living their best lives, and for a lot of us who might never have the opportunity to travel like this, it’s a way for us to see the world through all of these different eyes … And there’s only so much drama that can happen in nine months, surely.”

Fletcher bought to board the cruise for a day throughout its sole cease in England in July and meet the passengers she’d spent so many months attending to know nearly.

She was shocked by how massive the ship felt in actual life. The 13-deck Serenade of the Seas is 965 toes lengthy and 106 toes broad, in response to Royal Caribbean.

“I was like, ‘OK, so this ship is actually big enough that if you don’t like people, you could easily not see them,’” she provides.

Passengers agreed it was pretty straightforward to steer clear of the extra gossip-minded vacationers.

Several content material creators on board mentioned the spotlight of the journey was assembly folks and making buddies — and whereas social media performed a task in that, it in the end didn’t make or break their expertise.

Take passenger Amike Oosthuizen, who had achieved some influencing earlier than the cruise and, at the starting of the 12 months, spoke of pursuing it as a profession afterward.

But final week, from her lodge room in Miami, she recounted how her TikTok account had been blocked simply weeks earlier than the finish of the cruise: Someone reported it for promoting counterfeit Chanel items, which she mentioned she was “obviously not doing.”

It was devastating, she mentioned, particularly as a result of she misplaced so much of movies — and recollections — that she hadn’t saved off the app. She doesn’t remorse all the filming, modifying and posting she did, which she says taught her sensible abilities. But in hindsight, she puzzled if some of that point would have been higher spent dwelling in the second.

“It just showed me actually how volatile social media is,” Oosthuizen mentioned. “I really do like doing social media, but I don’t know if it is always like a thing I would want to do permanently.”

Now, about that drama

The world cruise wasn’t an remoted bubble. Some world occasions hit passengers particularly arduous.

“The big one that comes to mind that involved all of us was the big itinerary change and how the ship became a democracy,” Hunnicutt mentioned. “We had to vote on which route we were going to choose when we were unable to sail through the Middle East.”

The ship was initially alleged to sail through the Suez Canal in May, but the cruise line introduced earlier this 12 months that it might be rerouted on account of disruptions in the Red Sea, the place Iranian-backed Houthis have been attacking ships since the begin of the Israel-Hamas warfare.

Royal Caribbean gave passengers two options: “Immersive Africa,” a extra scenic route that may cease at a number of ports alongside the continent, or “Africa & Greece,” which might intention to get the ship round Africa and to Eastern Europe as shortly as attainable but concerned many extra days at sea.

“People were campaigning, people were sharing their opinions,” Hunnicutt recalled. “It was quite dramatic.”

Some of the folks against stopping in Africa made generalizations and arguments that their fellow vacationers perceived as racist — like classifying the complete continent as a complete and saying there was “nothing to do there.”

The passengers voted overwhelmingly for the first possibility, to see extra of Africa. But Hunnicutt says a good quantity of folks bought off the ship for that portion — some rejoined in Italy, others did not.

“When you travel for nine months, things are going to change, like the state of the world is going to change,” Fletcher mentioned. “So, many people were, ‘Let’s go with the flow,’ but others weren’t. And I guess, again, that’s just representative of real life.”

Another space of rising pressure was U.S. politics.

Fletcher mentioned some folks had been carrying MAGA hats and shirts on board all alongside. But the present political divide on the ship grew to become extra obvious in the spring when former President Donald Trump was convicted on felony charges.

Things escalated over the summer time after a passenger wore a “Let’s Go Brandon” hat. The rhetoric on show made some passengers uncomfortable, sparking a conversation about free speech and whether or not Royal Caribbean ought to draw a line.

Fletcher mentioned heaps of passengers began responding by carrying shirts and hats in assist of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Harris wasn’t even in the operating once they first bought on the ship, an indication of simply how a lot issues modified throughout the journey. (A passenger picked up the merch in bulk whereas on shore in the ultimate weeks.)

“Luckily, I guess there wasn’t that long left of the cruise, otherwise perhaps it might have become more of an issue,” Fletcher says.

More cruise content material is coming quickly

Once the cruise ended, there was a way that the floodgates may open and a few newly unencumbered passengers may spill the tea about their neighbors that they’d been sitting on for months.

Some promised they might reveal secrets and techniques again on land. In latest days, one TikToker teased, posted and then removed a number of movies’ price of nameless gossip.

The folks NPR spoke with mentioned they did not suppose there was a lot tea price spilling. For the most half, they mentioned folks aren’t attempting to burn bridges, but preserve the relationships they fashioned on the cruise.

“I would go as far as saying I met some of my best friends in my life on this cruise,” Oosthuizen mentioned.

Oosthuizen, who’s from South Africa, now has affords to crash with folks scattered throughout the U.S. Hunnicutt and her husband plan to cease at new buddies’ houses throughout their street journey from Florida to Las Vegas. Fletcher plans to look at the upcoming live-streamed marriage ceremony of the daughter of a cruise couple she grew to become near from afar.

And then there’s the reunion cruise.

In an onboard announcement simply days earlier than the cruise ended, Royal Caribbean International President and CEO Michael Bayley revealed there might be a seven-day reunion cruise in Alaska — which the world cruise did not go to — in September 2025.

“It’s a little bit of a part two of the Ultimate World Cruise because we know circumstances were the way they were,” he mentioned, including it will likely be on the similar actual ship.

Oosthuizen and Hunnicutt say they and most of the folks they know are planning to go — many purchased tickets earlier than they even bought off the ship. Fletcher, who says she by no means dreamed she’d need to go on a cruise earlier than overlaying this one, could attempt to make it (in any other case, she says, she’ll “definitely be cruising virtually”).

“The crazy and exciting thing is that anyone can book that cruise; it’s not just for world cruisers,” Hunnicutt mentioned. “So I believe that we will have followers that come join us on that cruise … people are just so excited and engaged with this experience.”

Another purpose to stay up for the reunion: That’s the place Royal Caribbean plans to announce the particulars of their next Ultimate World Cruise. Bayley mentioned passengers on the reunion cruise will get first dibs on rooms.

What does that imply for the so-called social media actuality present?

Hunnicutt says she nonetheless has cruise content material to submit, like recaps of her favourite locations and vlogs from days when she was too busy to edit. Fletcher is already turning her consideration to a different growing cruise drama: A ship scheduled for a three-year world cruise has been caught at its dwelling base in Belfast since May.

But Harms is skeptical any future world cruise protection will attain the similar viral heights as the unique.

“I think what happened was really special and unique and unprecedented in the way that we create content online, and I honestly don’t think it can be replicated again,” she mentioned. “Who knows? But I think that sometimes it’s nice to just have a special moment and then button that up and move on.”