Andrea Zelinski
I had no idea what to expect when I agreed to take a cruise in Tahiti my first week at Travel Weekly.
It was a new experience for me. Family vacations growing up were often Midwestern adventures, with me buckled in the reverse backseat of a station wagon waving at speeding cars. Traversing the continent by car was my thing as I got older. I then took to traveling on foot. I left my full-time job as a political reporter and spent seven months of the pandemic peacefully ambling the rocky ribbon of dirt from Maine to Georgia called the Appalachian Trail.
I was a land lover, all right, but I had never given the ocean a try. As I stood in late January on the balcony of Windstar's Star Breeze in the South Pacific, I got my first taste of what a cruise is about: the salt in the air, waking to a new view every morning, discovering how easy living on a ship could be.
My suite was surely an upgrade from the tent I had called home while hiking the AT a little more than a year ago, and meals devised by a James Beard award-winning chef and multiple restaurants to choose from made me easily satisfied with any extra pounds I might have gained.
Still, I understood that parts of my experience were different than anything else a cruiser might have experienced in the past. The omicron variant hit its peak in the U.S. about 10 days before I rode that half-empty cruise ship, and I anxiously navigated the Covid-19 protocols to fly internationally, worried I'd miss something. I filled out an online form for French Polynesian officials describing where I would be every day of my trip -- in excruciating detail, I might add -- only to have the website crash on me, twice.
At the airport, I was told I needed one final document attesting to my current health, and the attendant at the ticketing counter kindly printed the document out for me but could only find it in French. I then took three nose-tickling PCR tests before I could step foot on the ship, and two more before I could go home.
Of course, that's not how most people have experienced their first cruise. But as the industry hopes to rebound and tap potential customers from across the country, my experience might not be so rare.
The omicron BA.2 subvariant is leading a surge in the U.K., and if history is any indication, we'll see an uptick in cases in the U.S. as well. The relaxing of regulations we're seeing in the U.S. might not last, as new surges come along and crash into this returning sense of normalcy so many of us have been yearning for.
As we all find our way forward, I am looking forward to sharing my findings and observations about the cruise industry with you as we all continually adjust to the choppy waters before us.