A viral nine-month world cruise noticed loads of drama, however not the type you’d count on

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 angle of a rotating forged of characters (since individuals might be a part of at any level for a number of segments of the journey).

Most 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 sorts 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,” whilst some anxious that on-line hype would warp or in any other case worsen passengers’ actual lives.

Final week — after 274 nights, greater than 60 international locations and plenty of thousands and thousands of social media views — the cruise got here to an finish. Which suggests it’s lastly time to ask: How did it stay as much as the hype?

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

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

All of them spoke of forming lifelong friendships, marveling at world wonders (both firsthand or vicariously) and usually increasing their cultural horizons. In addition they 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,” stated passenger and TikTokker Jenny Hunnicutt.

However it wasn’t essentially the type that folks had anticipated, like romance rumors or interpersonal beefs. The larger scandals got here from a lot heavier exterior components — 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 continued battle within the Purple Sea, obtained delayed by local weather protesters in Amsterdam and narrowly missed an enormous earthquake in Taiwan. Passengers needed to be evacuated from Iceland’s Blue Lagoon due to volcanic exercise. And on board, many adopted — and more and more fought over — the numerous 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 true 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 anxiousness — was obvious.

Whereas 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, stated 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 stated. “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.”

Movies from and concerning the cruise captivated social media for the primary a number of months of the cruise, which creators say is a formidable period of time for a development to carry viewers’ consideration.

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

Harms reduce on her cruise content material however nonetheless stored 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.

A number of individuals instructed NPR that when the preliminary frenzy calmed down, TikTokkers realized how the social media hypothesis might affect passengers’ actual lives, for higher or worse. The handful of land-based creators ended up working collectively to determine 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 residence in Derbyshire, England (“as far away from an ocean as you can possibly get” within the UK), estimates she’s made some 300 movies about it this yr.

Of these, movies about individuals and the “so-called drama” tended to carry out the perfect. However after listening to from viewers who needed to observe 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 stated. “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 obtained 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 large the ship felt in actual life. The 13-deck Serenade of the Seas is 965 toes lengthy and 106 toes huge, 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 simple to avoid the extra gossip-minded vacationers.

A number of content material creators on board stated the spotlight of the journey was assembly individuals and making mates — and whereas social media performed a job in that, it in the end didn’t make or break their expertise.

Take passenger Amike Oosthuizen, who had performed some influencing earlier than the cruise and, initially of the yr, spoke of pursuing it as a profession afterward.

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

It was devastating, she stated, particularly as a result of she misplaced a variety of movies — and reminiscences — that she hadn’t saved off the app. She doesn’t remorse all of the filming, modifying and posting she did, which she says taught her sensible expertise. However in hindsight, she puzzled if a few of that point would have been higher spent residing within the second.

“It just showed me actually how volatile social media is,” Oosthuizen stated. “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 exhausting.

“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 stated. “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 imagined to sail by means of the Suez Canal in Might, however the cruise line introduced earlier this yr that it might be rerouted resulting from disruptions within the Purple Sea, the place Iranian-backed Houthis have been attacking ships for the reason that begin of the Israel-Hamas warfare.

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

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

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

The passengers voted overwhelmingly for the primary possibility, to see extra of Africa. However Hunnicutt says a good variety of individuals obtained off the ship for that portion — some rejoined in Italy, others didn’t.

“When you travel for nine months, things are going to change, like the state of the world is going to change,” Fletcher stated. “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.”

One other space of rising stress was U.S. politics.

Fletcher stated some individuals had been sporting MAGA hats and shirts on board all alongside. However the present political divide on the ship turned extra obvious within the spring when former President Donald Trump was convicted on felony fees.

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

Fletcher stated a number of passengers began responding by sporting shirts and hats in assist of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Harris wasn’t even within the operating once they first obtained on the ship, an indication of simply how a lot issues modified through the journey. (A passenger picked up the merch in bulk whereas on shore within the remaining 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.

Extra cruise content material is coming quickly

As soon as 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’d reveal secrets and techniques again on land. In latest days, one TikToker teased, posted and then eliminated a number of movies’ price of nameless gossip.

The individuals NPR spoke with stated they did not suppose there was a lot tea price spilling. For probably the most half, they stated individuals aren’t attempting to burn bridges, however preserve the relationships they shaped on the cruise.

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

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

After which there’s the reunion cruise.

In an onboard announcement simply days earlier than the cruise ended, Royal Caribbean Worldwide President and CEO Michael Bayley revealed there might be a seven-day reunion cruise in Alaska — which the world cruise didn’t 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 stated, including it will likely be on the identical precise ship.

Oosthuizen and Hunnicutt say they and the general public they know are planning to go — many purchased tickets earlier than they even obtained off the ship. Fletcher, who says she by no means dreamed she’d need to go on a cruise earlier than overlaying this one, might 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 stated. “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 excuse to stay up for the reunion: That’s the place Royal Caribbean plans to announce the main points of their subsequent Final World Cruise. Bayley stated 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 put up, 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 creating cruise drama: A ship scheduled for a three-year world cruise has been caught at its residence base in Belfast since Might.

However Harms is skeptical any future world cruise protection will attain the identical 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 stated. “Who knows? But I think that sometimes it’s nice to just have a special moment and then button that up and move on.”