I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm not a big fan of sea days. Cruising for me is all about seeing the different ports of call on my itinerary, not relaxing onboard staring out at the ocean.
Don't get me wrong, the occasional day at sea in between ports is nice to break things up but four or five days in a row? No thanks!
The problem is that some new fuel regulations that will come into play in 2015 may well mean a massive increase in sea days.
Currently ships at sea must emit no more than 1% sulphur in ECAs, (Environmentally Controlled Areas), but the new legislation that will be coming in will change that figure to 0.1%. This will massively increase the cost of fuel for a ship and, just like a car, the ships use less fuel when they're at sea going at full speed.
This new ruling will mean that the cruise lines will either have to massively increase their fuel supplements or, much more likely, start offering completely different itineraries with much fewer ports of call.
Several large cruise lines are looking at ways of working around this, most particularly by bringing in the concept of an average emission so that the 0.1% emission total is worked out over the total voyage and not just when they're in an ECA area.
So what does this mean for us cruisers? Well no one really knows at the moment but it's a good guess that cruise ships will all be travelling slower to avoid burning fuel. The up shot of this will be either fewer ports of call on your itinerary, with cruise lines focusing on building much bigger ships so the the cruise ship itself becomes the point of the holiday and the ports are just an added bonus or the cruise lines will have to find a whole new set of ports of call to stop at, much closer to each other so that they can all be reached at the new slower speeds..
Whatever happens though 2015 is going to look a lot different to anything were used to at the moment.
Happy cruising
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