Cruise ships may be one of the more affordable and accessible types of vacations for most people, but the trade-off is that you are essentially living on a gigantic floating petri dish of disease.
Not always. Considering how many cruise ships are out there in our seas every single day, it’s kind of impressive that they aren’t all 24/7 diarrhea bonanzas. But all it takes is one person with norovirus who didn’t wash their hands well enough to turn a week-long Caribbean vacation into a Roman vomitorium at sea.
It happened again. This time, the setting was the Star Princess, where more than 150 people, including passengers and crew, were hit with norovirus during a Caribbean voyage in early March. Roughly 4300 passengers and 1500 crew members were aboard the ship, of whom more than 190 reported symptoms before the trip ended.
The illness, which causes those afflicted to spray from both ends until they can’t spray anymore (and then still manages to find stuff to spray), first showed up about a week into the voyage. It eventually turned the trip into a two-week quarantine.
Norovirus Turns Cruise Ship Into A Poop And Vomit Wonderland. Again.
Norovirus isn’t rare or deadly, but speaking strictly in medical terms, it does suck. Vomiting and diarrhea don’t pair well with tight hallways and shared dining spaces. While cruise ship health and safety procedures have certainly improved over the years, it’s still impossible to completely contain a tiny microbe, especially in close quarters.
To contain the outbreak, crew members isolated sick passengers, ramped up cleaning protocols, and collected stool samples for testing. Passengers reported seeing sanitation efforts in action, with crew members furiously wiping down tabletops and removing shared items like salt shakers to minimize contact with anything that could be contaminated.
When the ship was docked in Fort Lauderdale, it underwent a thorough deep cleaning before heading out again, as is common procedure.
Ships of all kinds, dating back centuries, have been ruthlessly efficient carriers of illness, from sailors battling scurvy to plague-era rats to norovirus spreading on cruise ships like wildfire. While health and safety procedures aboard ships have greatly improved, especially post-pandemic, with many cruise ships offering free, abundant access to hand sanitizer, 2025 still saw 22 reported norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships, up from 18 in the year prior.
The fantasy of cruise travel is it’s all inclusiveness. You’re at a floating hotel that takes you to the destinations while feeling like the destinations are coming to you. If you’re looking for that perfect cross-section between vacationing and effortlessness, you can’t do much better than cruising.
But there is a trade-off. Several, really. One being violent diarrhea and vomiting with no escape.
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