Allie Hubers Cruise lines are hyper-focused on providing excellent experiences and attentive service. Satisfied guests lead to repeat customers, which impacts the bottom line for cruise lines.
After all, cruise lines exist to make money, and they rely heavily on both new and repeat customers to keep ships sailing and profits high. A loyal customer base is essential in an industry where competition is fierce, and brand loyalty can make or break a company’s reputation.
To ensure they are meeting these expectations, cruise lines solicit feedback through post-cruise surveys. This is where guests can provide an opportunity for honest feedback about their entire cruise experience, from dining and entertainment to service and cleanliness.
How do cruise lines measure guest satisfaction?
Cruise lines gauge customer satisfaction by relying on an industry-standard metric called Net Promoter Score.
This is a key metric that gauges customer satisfaction by identifying how many guests are considered “promoters” (advocates who would recommend the cruise to others), “passives” (neutral guests), or “detractors” (those who had a negative experience).
But here’s where things get tricky—anything less than a score of 9 or 10 is often considered a failure. Even a seemingly decent score of 8 can be categorized as passive, meaning the guest is unlikely to actively promote the cruise.
At the end of your cruise, you might have noticed crew members beginning to address the importance of completing your post-cruise survey. This trend has become more apparent, especially post-pandemic where cruise lines are aiming to improve profits and reduce costs.
This hyper-focus on achieving perfect scores creates an environment where crew members are pushed to ensure every guest not only enjoys their experience but also gives top-tier ratings on their surveys.
The weight of a perfect score: Pressure on crew members
Ideally, the surveys would be used as a tool to highlight strengths and identify areas of improvement. In reality, cruise lines have placed so much importance on these survey scores that crew members’ livelihoods now rely heavily on these survey scores.
In a push for better scores, it’s clear that cruise lines are relying heavily on survey feedback to gauge not only the overall cruise experience, but also feedback for specific restaurants, venues, services, and crew members.
Multiple crew members across different cruise lines have exposed that subpar scores can lead to severe consequences. This could include reduced downtime, more training, less pay, missed bonuses, and fewer opportunities for work.
This structure puts tremendous pressure on crew members, many of whom spend 6-9 months away from home working 10-12 hour shifts with minimal time off.
For most crew members, their wages are the primary source of income for their families back home. The stakes are incredibly high, and the constant stress of maintaining perfect scores takes a toll, both physically and mentally.
Stressed crew members lead to biased scores from guilted guests
While it’s understandable that cruise lines want to maintain high standards, the extreme push to earn positive survey feedback creates an uncomfortable situation for crew members and passengers.
It might be necessary to measure performance metrics, as most businesses strive for excellence in their respective industries, but it’s apparent that cruise lines need to reevaluate their current survey models.
As your cruise comes to an end, it’s not uncommon for crew members to begin mentioning the post-cruise survey. Sometimes these reminders are subtle, but in many cases, crew members openly emphasize how crucial perfect scores are for their careers.
I’ve personally had crew members stress the extreme importance of receiving high scores, sharing how anything less than a 9 or 10 can have serious consequences for their job, putting their family’s livelihood at risk.
The extreme push for positive survey feedback and the weight of repercussions for less-than-perfect scores is stressful for both crew members and guests onboard. Crew members have resorted to reminding guests constantly of the importance of answering the surveys, and sharing the negative repercussions for negative feedback.
This puts passengers in a difficult position. Even if they had a great experience overall but encountered a few minor inconveniences, they’re often hesitant to provide honest feedback.
Many guests don’t want to feel responsible for causing harm to a hardworking crew member’s livelihood, so they give perfect scores, even if their experience wasn’t flawless.
In fact, some cruise lines, namely Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises, explicitly ask in their survey if any crew members mentioned providing positive scores on the survey—going as far as asking passengers to provide names.
Most cruisers don’t want crew members to be punished, leading to inflated survey scores. But, it’s unrealistic that cruises will be perfect.
This creates a situation where passengers are no longer providing genuine feedback that could lead to meaningful improvements. Instead, they’re giving inflated ratings out of guilt or a desire to protect the crew members they’ve bonded with over the course of their voyage.
Crew members seem to be punished for things beyond their control
One of the most frustrating aspects of the current survey culture is that crew members are often held accountable for factors beyond their control.
For example, main dining room servers have reported that guest satisfaction with food quality, something that is determined by corporate decisions and culinary teams, is tied to their individual performance scores.
Even though servers have no control over the quality of ingredients or the taste of the dishes, they can still be penalized if guests rate the food poorly.
Also, cabin stewards have expressed frustration that maintenance issues or delays, which are handled by different departments, can reflect negatively on their own survey scores.
This system creates a disconnect between accountability and control, where crew members are punished for circumstances they cannot change.
A flawed system that needs re-evaluation
While it’s reasonable for cruise lines to want to track guest satisfaction and hold crew members accountable for maintaining high standards, the current system has gone too far. It’s off-putting to guests and frustrating for crew members relying on a potentially biased metric and flared strategy.
The intense focus on survey results has created a cycle where:
- Crew members feel pressured – They constantly remind passengers about surveys, creating an environment where the service can feel transactional.
- Passengers feel guilty – Guests feel torn between giving honest feedback to the cruise line and protecting the crew, leading to inflated scores.
- Cruise lines miss valuable feedback – Because passengers are reluctant to give realistic ratings, cruise lines lose out on genuine insights that could help them improve their offerings.
So, what’s the solution?
It’s a nuanced question with no simple answer. Cruise lines clearly rely on surveys to hold crew members accountable, often with financial repercussions. However, instead of using surveys as a tool for growth and training or as a way to reward top performers, cruise lines seem to be leveraging them more as a mechanism for punishment.
To fix this, cruise lines should reframe survey objectives to focus on honest feedback, decouple crew evaluations from survey scores, and redirect feedback to appropriate departments rather than holding individual crew members accountable for factors beyond their control.
Allowing for more open-ended feedback that is not tied to any certain crew member or department could encourage guests to provide genuine feedback. Cruise lines could allow passengers to submit anonymous surveys to facilitate honest responses and remove the emotional burden of potentially impacting the crew’s livelihood.
In addition, cruise lines could look to other metrics for satisfaction instead of relying so heavily on survey responses. For instance, guests who request to be seated with the same servers in the dining room would signify a positive experience.
Instead of punishing less-than-perfect crew members, perhaps the cruise lines should focus on rewarding those who have earned the highest scores. Crew members are still motivated to work hard and provide excellent service without fear of repercussions.
By promoting a culture that values genuine insights over inflated ratings, cruise lines can ensure continuous improvement while protecting their crew from undue stress.
